Nine Paid Advertising Mistakes We Fix in Almost Every New Account

Google Ads · 30 May 2026 · 9 min read

Account takeovers are repetitive in a useful way. The same nine issues account for most of the recoverable waste we find, and none of them require clever tactics to fix — only attention. If you run your own campaigns, this list is worth an hour of your time before you spend another pound.

1. Broad match with no negative keyword discipline

Broad match with smart bidding is legitimate — with a robust negative list and weekly search-term review. Without either, we routinely find 30–50% of spend on terms that could never convert: job seekers, DIY researchers, competitor names, wrong geographies, 'free' and 'cheap' modifiers on a premium service. Build a shared negative list at account level and add to it weekly for the first three months.

2. Location targeting set to 'presence or interest'

The default setting shows ads to people merely interested in your location — including people on the other side of the world reading about it. For any local business, set targeting to 'presence' only and exclude locations you do not serve. This one checkbox has recovered five-figure annual waste in accounts we have inherited.

3. Counting every micro-action as a conversion

Page views, scroll depth and outbound clicks marked as primary conversions teach the bidding algorithm to buy browsers. Demote everything except real enquiries and sales to secondary.

4. Sending all traffic to the homepage

The homepage is built for people who already know you. A paid visitor arriving from a specific query needs a page about that specific thing. Even a simple duplicated page with a matched headline and a form usually lifts conversion rate by half again.

5. Ignoring the auction after 5pm

• Leads generated outside working hours go stale fast — contact rates fall sharply after the first hour.
• Either staff the response window, use an automated booking link in the autoresponder, or reduce bids in hours you cannot service.
• Check the hour-of-day report before assuming; some accounts convert best at 9pm and the owner never knew.

6. Never refreshing Meta creative

Meta accounts decay predictably. Frequency climbs, hook rate falls, cost per result rises, and the advertiser concludes 'Meta stopped working'. Meta did not stop working; the audience got bored. Three new concepts a month is the minimum maintenance dose for most small accounts.

7. Bidding on brand without checking incrementality

Brand campaigns look phenomenal and are sometimes necessary — when competitors bid on your name or when your organic listing is buried. They are also the easiest place for an account to manufacture flattering results. Run a two-week brand pause test in a low-season period and see what actually happens to total enquiries.

8. Restructuring instead of waiting

Smart bidding needs stability. Changing targets, budgets or structure more than roughly every two weeks keeps campaigns permanently in learning. We ask clients to accept a fortnightly change cadence, with an explicit exception for anything actively losing money.

9. No follow-up system for the leads that arrive

• Response within five minutes dramatically outperforms response within an hour on contact rate.
• Most enquiries need five or more attempts across phone, email and WhatsApp before they are genuinely dead.
• A lead marked 'not interested' after one unanswered call is not a lead-quality problem, though it will be reported as one.
• Fixing follow-up is frequently cheaper than fixing the ads, and it improves every channel at once.

Where to start if you only do one thing

Open the search-terms report for the last 30 days, sort by cost, and read the top hundred rows. Almost everyone finds something in the first five minutes that pays for the exercise.

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