Where small business Google Ads budgets leak, and how to get the money back

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Google Ads is one of the fastest ways for a small business to win customers. You can be in front of people searching for exactly what you sell within a day. It’s also one of the easiest ways to spend money without noticing where it’s going.

The problem is rarely one big mistake. It’s a handful of small leaks that each look harmless. Added together, they often account for a large share of the budget doing very little. Here are the ones that come up again and again, and what to do about each.

1. Is your tracking counting the right things?

Everything else depends on this. If your account counts page views, button clicks or time on site as “conversions”, Google’s automated bidding will chase those instead of customers. The account looks healthy while the phone stays quiet.

The fix: check what’s set up as a conversion. It should be the actions that make you money: completed enquiry forms, phone calls over a set length, and sales. Remove or demote everything else. If you take sales or bookings offline, import them back into Google Ads so it learns which clicks really became customers.

2. Are you paying for searches you’d never choose?

Broad match keywords and Performance Max campaigns give Google a lot of freedom to decide which searches trigger your ads. Sometimes that finds useful new searches. Often it finds irrelevant ones: job seekers, people looking for free versions, or searches for a different service entirely.

The fix: open the search terms report every week and look at what people actually typed before clicking. Add the irrelevant ones as negative keywords. A good starting list of negatives for most businesses includes words like “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “course” and “DIY”, but your own search terms will show you the rest.

3. Is your brand making the numbers look better than they are?

People who search for your business by name were probably going to find you anyway. When those brand clicks are mixed into the same campaigns as everything else, they flatter the results: cheap clicks, high conversion rates, and a campaign that looks profitable even when the rest of it isn’t.

The fix: separate brand searches into their own campaign and judge the rest of the account without them. In Performance Max, use brand exclusions so it doesn’t take credit for customers who were already looking for you.

4. Are you bidding the same everywhere?

Most small businesses serve some areas, days and times better than others. A click from a town you rarely work in, or a call at 9pm when nobody answers, is worth far less than a weekday morning enquiry from your best area. By default, many accounts bid the same for all of them.

The fix: look at your results by location, day and hour. Reduce bids or exclude areas and times that don’t convert, and raise them where they do.

5. Are your landing pages costing you money?

Google scores each keyword on Quality Score, from 1 to 10, based partly on how relevant and useful your landing page is. A low score means you pay more per click for the same position. Sending every ad to your homepage is one of the most common causes.

The fix: send each group of ads to the page that matches the search. Someone searching for “emergency boiler repair” should land on a page about emergency boiler repair, with a phone number at the top.

6. Are thin-margin products getting the same budget as your best sellers?

For online shops, Shopping campaigns often treat every product the same. Low-margin products can eat the budget while your most profitable lines are under-funded.

The fix: split products by margin or performance and give each group its own budget and return-on-spend target.

Should you manage it yourself?

You can, if you have the time to check search terms weekly and the confidence to make changes. Many small business owners manage perfectly well on modest budgets. Where it usually pays to bring in a specialist Google Ads agency is when the budget is large enough that the leaks above cost more than the management fee, or when nobody internally has the time to keep on top of it.

Either way, the principle is the same. Judge Google Ads on the cost of each customer it brings in, not on clicks or impressions. Once you measure it that way, the leaks become much easier to find.

Adil Jain is co-founder and Paid Media Director at 408 Media, a Google Partner search agency with offices in Sandbach, Manchester and Birmingham. He has managed paid search for nearly 20 years.