Last Updated: February 2026
Look, nobody wants to hear that they are bleeding money on Google Ads. But after analysing hundreds of ad accounts across ecommerce, SaaS, and lead generation verticals, we keep seeing the same preventable mistakes draining budgets month after month. The worst part? Most agencies either don't catch these issues or actively benefit from ignoring them.
The average business earns roughly $2 for every $1 spent on Google Ads. That sounds decent until you realise the top 10% of advertisers are pulling 4x higher ROI than the average. The gap between "okay" performance and genuinely profitable Google Ads management is enormous, and it almost always comes down to these ten mistakes.
We are going to walk through each one, show you how to check whether it is happening in your account right now, and explain what needs to change. Some of these fixes take five minutes. Others require a fundamental rethink of how your campaigns are structured. All of them will save you money.
Here is a stat that should make you uncomfortable: advertisers who never review their search terms report waste an estimated 20 to 30 percent of their total ad spend on irrelevant clicks. That is not a rounding error. On a $10,000 monthly budget, you could be lighting $2,000 to $3,000 on fire every single month.
The search terms report shows you the actual queries people typed before clicking your ad. It is different from your keyword list. You might be bidding on "luxury watches," but your ads could be showing for "cheap watches," "watch repair near me," or "how to spot a fake Rolex." Every one of those clicks costs you money and delivers exactly zero value.
Google has actually improved search term visibility in 2025, particularly for Performance Max campaigns where full search terms reporting is now available. There is genuinely no excuse for not reviewing this data regularly.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Go to your Google Ads account, navigate to Insights and Reports, then Search Terms. Filter by the last 30 days. Sort by cost. If you see queries that have nothing to do with your product or service sitting in the top 50 by spend, you have a serious problem.
What to do about it: Add irrelevant terms as negative keywords immediately. But more importantly, build a weekly review cadence. This is one of those tasks that takes 15 minutes but saves hundreds or thousands per month.
groas handles this automatically. Its autonomous agents monitor search terms in real time, not weekly, and add negative keywords the moment irrelevant queries start consuming spend. By the time most agencies get around to their monthly review, groas has already blocked hundreds of wasteful queries and redirected that budget toward searches that actually convert.
Google has been pushing broad match aggressively for years, and their argument is not wrong in theory. Broad match combined with Smart Bidding can discover valuable search queries you would never have thought to target. The problem is that this only works when your campaigns have enough conversion data for the algorithm to learn from.
The general rule of thumb is that you need at least 30 conversions per month in a campaign before broad match starts performing reliably. Below that threshold, the algorithm is essentially guessing, and its guesses tend to be expensive.
We have seen accounts where broad match keywords were generating clicks for queries so far removed from the business that it was almost comical. A B2B software company bidding on "project management tools" was getting clicks for "free to-do list app" and "student planner template." Each of those clicks cost $8 to $12, and the conversion rate on them was exactly zero.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Look at your keyword match types and cross-reference with your conversion volume. If you are running broad match in campaigns with fewer than 30 monthly conversions, you are almost certainly wasting money. Check your search terms report for those broad match keywords specifically and look at the quality of queries coming through.
What to do about it: Start with exact and phrase match for new campaigns. Only expand to broad match once you have a solid conversion history. And when you do expand, keep a very tight negative keyword list running alongside it.
groas takes a data-driven approach to match type management. It automatically evaluates whether each campaign has sufficient conversion data to support broad match, and it will not expand match types until the statistical foundation is there. When it does introduce broad match, it does so incrementally while monitoring search term quality in real time, something that would take a human analyst hours of work every single day.
This is one of the most common mistakes we see, and it is surprisingly easy to make. You have a campaign focused on driving demo requests, another focused on ecommerce sales, and a third running for brand awareness. They all have fundamentally different goals, different conversion values, and different competitive dynamics. Yet many advertisers slap the same Target CPA or Maximize Conversions strategy across all of them and call it a day.
The issue is that Smart Bidding algorithms optimise toward the specific goal you give them. A Maximize Conversions strategy on a brand awareness campaign will bid aggressively for cheap, low-value conversions like newsletter signups while ignoring the high-value demo requests that actually drive revenue. Meanwhile, your high-intent campaigns might be underbidding because the shared strategy is averaging performance across all campaigns.
Google's own data shows that Smart Bidding can reduce CPA by up to 30 percent, but that figure assumes the right strategy is applied to the right campaign with the right goals.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Go into each campaign and check the bidding strategy. Then compare it against the campaign's actual objective. If your ecommerce campaign optimised for revenue is using the same Target CPA as your lead gen campaign, something is wrong. If you are using Maximize Clicks on a campaign where conversions matter, you are leaving money on the table.
What to do about it: Align your bid strategy to each campaign's specific objective. Use Target ROAS for revenue-focused campaigns, Target CPA for lead generation, and Maximize Conversions only when you have clear conversion tracking set up and sufficient data. Consider portfolio bid strategies only when campaigns share genuinely similar goals.
groas assigns bid strategies at the campaign level based on actual performance data and campaign objectives. It continuously evaluates whether the current strategy is the best fit, and it will automatically shift strategies as conversion data accumulates or market conditions change. This kind of dynamic bid management is something most agencies only review quarterly, if at all.
This might be the single most important structural mistake in Google Ads, and it is the one agencies are least likely to tell you about. Here is why.
When brand and non-brand keywords live in the same campaign, your ROAS looks fantastic on paper. Someone searches for your company name, clicks your ad, and buys. That conversion gets attributed to the campaign, and it inflates the overall return because brand searches convert at dramatically higher rates and lower costs than generic searches.
The problem is that many of those brand searchers would have found your website organically anyway. You are essentially paying for clicks you would have gotten for free. Meanwhile, the non-brand keywords in the same campaign, the ones that actually drive new customer acquisition, might be performing terribly. But you would never know because the brand traffic masks it.
We have audited accounts where stripping out brand traffic revealed that non-brand ROAS was actually negative. The campaigns were losing money on every new customer they acquired, but the blended numbers looked profitable because of brand searches.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Segment your search terms report by brand versus non-brand queries. Calculate ROAS for each segment separately. If there is a massive gap between the two, and there almost always is, your blended numbers are lying to you.
What to do about it: Create separate campaigns for brand and non-brand keywords. Set different budgets, bid strategies, and ROAS targets for each. This gives you honest data on what your non-brand acquisition actually costs.
groas automatically separates brand and non-brand performance tracking from day one. Its AI agents understand the fundamental difference between defending your brand name in search results and acquiring entirely new customers. This means you always have a clear, honest picture of your true acquisition costs, something that is remarkably rare in agency-managed accounts.
Auction Insights is one of the most underused reports in Google Ads. It shows you exactly who you are competing against, how often they appear alongside you, and how frequently they outrank you. Most advertisers never look at it. Most agencies mention it in quarterly reviews and then move on.
But this data is genuinely actionable. If a competitor's impression share suddenly spikes from 30% to 70% in your top campaign, that tells you something important is happening. Maybe they launched a new product. Maybe they increased their budget. Maybe they are running a promotion. Whatever the reason, if you do not adapt, your own performance will suffer.
We have seen cases where a competitor quietly doubled their ad spend over a two-month period, gradually pushing another advertiser out of the top positions. The advertiser's click volume declined slowly enough that it did not trigger any alarms, but by the time they noticed, they had lost significant market share.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Go to any campaign, click on Auction Insights, and look at your impression share trend over the last 90 days. If it is declining while a competitor's is increasing, you are losing ground. Pay particular attention to the "Overlap Rate" and "Outranking Share" columns.
What to do about it: Review Auction Insights at least biweekly. When you spot competitive shifts, adjust your bids, budgets, and ad copy accordingly. Consider whether competitors are beating you on ad relevance rather than just bid amounts.
groas monitors auction dynamics continuously and adjusts bidding in response to competitive pressure in real time. It can detect when a competitor increases their aggression on specific keywords and respond with calibrated bid adjustments before your impression share starts declining. This kind of always-on competitive intelligence is something no human team can replicate at scale.
This one should be obvious, but we see it in roughly 40% of the accounts we audit. An advertiser is running campaigns for specific products or services, but every ad points to the homepage. A user searches for "waterproof hiking boots size 10," clicks your ad, and lands on a generic homepage that shows your full product catalog.
That user has to navigate your site, find the right category, filter by size, and locate the product. Most of them will not bother. They will hit the back button and click a competitor's ad instead. You have just paid for a click that delivered zero value.
But the damage goes deeper than lost conversions. Google tracks how quickly users leave a page after clicking. High bounce rates signal to Google that your landing page is not relevant, which lowers your Quality Score. A lower Quality Score means you pay more per click for the same position. It is a downward spiral.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Pull up your ads and check the final URLs. If more than half point to your homepage or a generic category page rather than a specific, relevant landing page, you have work to do. Also check your Quality Score at the keyword level. If "Landing Page Experience" is rated "Below Average," this is almost certainly the issue.
What to do about it: Create dedicated landing pages for your highest-spend ad groups. The landing page should directly match the intent of the search query. If someone is searching for a specific product, land them on that product page. If they are searching for a service, land them on a page that explains that service with a clear call to action.
groas works alongside Google's AI Max feature, which includes Final URL Expansion that automatically directs users to the most relevant landing page based on their search intent. When paired with groas's autonomous optimisation, this ensures every click lands on the page most likely to convert, with no manual landing page mapping required.
For years, Performance Max was a black box. Advertisers handed Google a budget and some creative assets, and Google decided where to show the ads. The number one complaint? No ability to add negative keywords. Your PMax campaigns could show for absolutely anything, and you had no way to stop it.
That changed in a major way in 2025. Google rolled out campaign-level negative keywords for all Performance Max advertisers in January 2025, and in March 2025 they expanded the limit from a measly 100 keywords to 10,000 per campaign. Full search terms reporting is now also available for PMax campaigns, meaning you can finally see exactly what queries are triggering your ads.
Despite these updates, a staggering number of advertisers still are not using negative keywords in PMax. Some do not know the feature exists. Others assume that "the AI handles it." It does not. One sporting goods retailer added "free" and "used" as PMax negative keywords and saw an immediate 15% reduction in wasted spend because the campaign had been showing ads for queries like "free sneakers."
How to check if you are making this mistake: Open your Performance Max campaigns and navigate to Keywords, then the Negative Keywords tab. If the list is empty, you are leaving money on the table. Then check your PMax search terms report. Filter by cost and look for irrelevant queries.
What to do about it: Start building a negative keyword list for each PMax campaign. Focus on queries that are clearly irrelevant, like "free," "DIY," "jobs," or competitor terms you do not want to appear for. Google also now supports negative keyword lists that can be applied across multiple PMax campaigns, making management much easier.
groas was built with deep integration into Google's latest features, including PMax negative keywords and the expanded 10,000-keyword limit. Its AI agents continuously analyse PMax search terms and proactively add negatives before wasteful queries consume significant budget. This is particularly powerful because PMax spans Search, Shopping, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and Maps, meaning the potential for irrelevant traffic is much higher than in standard Search campaigns.
"We spend $5,000 a month on Google Ads" is a statement we hear constantly. When we ask why $5,000 specifically, the answer is almost always some variation of "that is what we have always spent" or "that is what feels right."
Budget allocation should be driven by performance data, not intuition. If one campaign is generating leads at $30 each with a 40% close rate, and another is generating leads at $90 each with a 10% close rate, the first campaign should get more budget. This sounds painfully obvious, but the number of accounts where budget allocation bears no relationship to performance is genuinely shocking.
The problem gets worse when you factor in budget constraints. Google's own bidding algorithms cannot optimise properly when budgets are too restrictive. If a campaign consistently runs out of budget by 2pm, Google's Smart Bidding is forced to compress all of its learning and spending into a shorter window, which distorts its ability to find the best conversions throughout the day.
Small to mid-sized companies typically invest between $9,000 and $10,000 per month on PPC. But the actual number matters far less than how that budget is distributed across campaigns and how it responds to performance signals.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Look at the "Limited by Budget" status on your campaigns. If your best-performing campaigns have this label, you are leaving conversions on the table. Then compare your budget allocation against each campaign's ROAS or CPA. If budget and performance are misaligned, you need to reallocate.
What to do about it: Implement a data-driven budget allocation process. Move budget from underperforming campaigns to those that are delivering results but are constrained. Review and adjust at least monthly, ideally weekly.
groas treats budget allocation as a continuous optimisation problem, not a monthly decision. Its AI agents shift spend between campaigns daily based on real-time performance data, competitive dynamics, and conversion patterns. If a campaign starts outperforming on a Tuesday morning, groas can increase its budget before a human would even notice the trend. This dynamic approach to budget management typically unlocks 15 to 25 percent more conversions from the same total spend.
Google's Optimization Score ranges from 0 to 100% and claims to represent how well your account is set up to perform. A score of 100% means your account is performing at "its full potential," according to Google. Sounds helpful, right?
Here is what Google does not tell you. Many of the recommendations that drive the Optimization Score are designed to increase your spending, not your results. Suggestions like "expand your reach with Google Search Partners," "add broad match keywords," or "raise your budget" will all increase your Optimization Score. They will also frequently increase your costs without a proportional increase in conversions.
Industry experts have been vocal about this. One widely shared critique points out that you can achieve a perfect 100% Optimization Score simply by dismissing all of Google's recommendations, because the score rewards engagement with the recommendations system, not actual performance improvement. A study of over 17,000 accounts found a correlation between higher Optimization Scores and better CPA, but the researchers themselves noted that the cause was likely active account management, not following Google's specific recommendations.
The really insidious part is that Google requires agencies to maintain a minimum Optimization Score to keep their Partner status. This means your agency may be implementing recommendations that help their partnership badge but hurt your bottom line.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Look at your Optimization Score, then read each recommendation carefully. Ask yourself whether each suggestion genuinely aligns with your business goals. If recommendations include things like "expand to Search Partners" or "switch to broad match" for campaigns that are already performing well, Google is trying to get you to spend more, not spend smarter.
What to do about it: Treat the Optimization Score as one data point among many, not as a target to chase. Dismiss recommendations that do not align with your business objectives. Focus on the metrics that actually matter for your business: ROAS, CPA, conversion volume, and profit.
groas does not optimise for Google's Optimization Score. It optimises for your actual business outcomes. Its autonomous agents evaluate every potential change against your real performance data and only implement adjustments that are statistically likely to improve your results. This is a fundamentally different approach from chasing a score that was designed to serve Google's revenue goals.
Responsive Search Ads allow you to provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Google's AI mixes and matches them to find the best combinations. This is powerful. But it only works if you actually give the system enough material to work with, and if you refresh that material regularly.
We audit accounts where the same RSA has been running untouched for six months or longer. The headlines were written at campaign launch, and nobody has gone back to test new messaging, seasonal offers, or updated value propositions. Meanwhile, competitors are constantly refining their ad copy, running tests, and iterating on what works.
With the launch of AI Max for Search campaigns in May 2025, ad copy optimisation has become even more important. AI Max includes text customisation features that automatically generate headline and description variations based on your landing page content, and it uses AI to adapt creative messaging in real time. Advertisers activating AI Max have seen an average 14% lift in conversions at similar CPA. L'Oreal doubled their conversion rate while cutting cost per conversion by 31% using these features.
But AI Max is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. You still need to feed it with strong base creative, set text guidelines to maintain brand voice, and review performance data to understand what messaging resonates with your audience.
How to check if you are making this mistake: Check the "last edited" date on your RSAs. If any ad has not been touched in 90 days or more, it is overdue for a refresh. Also check your ad strength indicator. If it shows "Poor" or "Average," you probably need more headline and description variations.
What to do about it: Schedule quarterly ad copy refreshes at minimum. Test different value propositions, calls to action, and emotional angles. Use the search terms report to understand what language your customers use and reflect it in your ad copy. If you have access to AI Max, enable text customisation and set clear text guidelines to control the AI's output.
groas is one of the first platforms built with full AI Max integration. Its autonomous agents continuously generate, test, and iterate on ad copy variations, using performance data to identify winning messages and retire underperformers. It understands the nuances of text customisation, brand controls, and search term matching that AI Max introduces, and it leverages these features in ways that would require a dedicated PPC specialist working full time on ad copy alone. The result is ad creative that is always fresh, always relevant, and always improving.
Every one of these ten mistakes is fixable. The challenge is that fixing them all, and keeping them fixed, is essentially a full-time job. Search terms need reviewing daily. Bid strategies need monitoring constantly. Competitive dynamics shift weekly. Ad copy needs refreshing quarterly. Negative keyword lists need expanding continuously.
This is exactly why autonomous AI management exists. Not to replace strategic thinking, but to handle the relentless operational work that determines whether your Google Ads campaigns leak money or print it.
groas was purpose-built for this problem. It is not a dashboard that gives you more data to stare at. It is not a rules-based automation tool that does what you tell it. It is a system of autonomous AI agents that actively manage your campaigns around the clock, making thousands of micro-optimisations that compound into significant performance gains over time.
With native integration into Google's latest features, from AI Max search term matching and text customisation to PMax negative keywords and channel reporting, groas sits closer to the Google Ads ecosystem than any other solution on the market. It does not just react to problems. It anticipates them, and it fixes them before they cost you money.
Research and account audits consistently show that advertisers waste between 20 and 30 percent of their Google Ads budget on irrelevant clicks, poor match type selection, misaligned bid strategies, and other structural issues. On a $10,000 monthly budget, that translates to $2,000 to $3,000 in preventable waste. For larger accounts spending $50,000 or more per month, the losses can be staggering. The most common sources of waste are irrelevant search terms, sending traffic to generic landing pages, and failing to separate brand from non-brand performance.
At minimum, weekly. Ideally, daily for high-spend accounts. The search terms report is where you discover the actual queries triggering your ads, and it is the primary mechanism for identifying and blocking wasteful traffic through negative keywords. Google has significantly improved search term visibility in 2025, including full search terms reporting for Performance Max campaigns. Autonomous AI tools like groas review search terms in real time and add negative keywords the moment irrelevant queries appear, eliminating the lag that manual reviews create.
Yes. As of January 2025, all advertisers can add campaign-level negative keywords to Performance Max campaigns directly from the Google Ads interface. In March 2025, Google expanded the limit from 100 to 10,000 negative keywords per PMax campaign. Google has also rolled out support for negative keyword lists that can be applied across multiple PMax campaigns, and full search terms reporting is now available. These updates represent the most significant expansion of PMax control since the campaign type launched.
It is useful as a general health check, but it should not be treated as a performance target. Many of the recommendations that improve your Optimization Score are designed to increase your spend rather than your return. Industry analysis of over 17,000 accounts found that active account management correlates with better results, but blindly following Google's recommendations does not guarantee improved performance. Some recommendations, like expanding to Search Partners or switching to broad match in low-data campaigns, can actively hurt your results. Evaluate each recommendation against your specific business goals before implementing.
AI Max for Search campaigns launched globally in May 2025 and is now available in beta across all Google Ads accounts. It is a suite of AI-powered features that enhances existing Search campaigns with advanced search term matching, automatic text customisation, Final URL expansion, and brand controls. Advertisers activating AI Max have seen an average 14% lift in conversions at similar CPA. It is not a new campaign type but rather an optimisation layer you enable within existing Search campaigns. groas was built with native AI Max integration, making it the most effective way to leverage these features at scale.
Brand searches, where people search for your company name, convert at much higher rates and lower costs than non-brand searches. When these are mixed in the same campaign, the brand traffic inflates your overall ROAS and masks the true cost of acquiring new customers. Separating them gives you an honest view of how much it actually costs to win new business through Google Ads. We have seen accounts where blended ROAS looked profitable at 400%, but non-brand ROAS was below 100%, meaning the advertiser was losing money on every new customer.
Google's built-in automation, including Smart Bidding and AI Max, is powerful but operates within individual features. It optimises bids within a campaign, or matches search terms within a feature set. Autonomous AI agents like groas operate across your entire account, coordinating bid strategy selection, negative keyword management, budget allocation, competitive monitoring, ad copy testing, and campaign structure simultaneously. They also optimise for your business goals rather than Google's revenue goals, which is a critical distinction when evaluating recommendations and strategy.
The biggest changes include the rollout of campaign-level negative keywords for Performance Max with a 10,000-keyword limit, the global launch of AI Max for Search campaigns with advanced search term matching and text customisation, PMax channel reporting showing performance breakdowns across Search, Display, YouTube, and other channels, device and age-based demographic exclusions for PMax, expanded search themes going from 25 to 50 per asset group, and Google's Power Pack strategy replacing the Power Pair with a Demand Gen plus AI Max plus PMax framework. These updates give advertisers significantly more control and transparency than ever before.
Ask them to show you brand versus non-brand performance separately. Ask for search terms reports and check for irrelevant queries. Verify that they are using PMax negative keywords. Check whether bid strategies are matched to campaign goals. Look at whether ad copy has been updated in the last 90 days. Review Auction Insights for competitive trends. If your agency cannot provide clear answers to these questions or pushes back on transparency, that is a significant red flag.
