Here are the five we see most often when we take over an account someone's been running themselves, or another agency handed off.

1. Broad match keywords with no negative keyword list

Broad match tells Google to show your ad for anything it decides is "related" to your keyword, which sounds convenient until you check the search terms report and find your roofing ad showing up for "how to fix a roof yourself." Without a negative keyword list actively trimming out irrelevant searches, you're paying for clicks that were never going to become customers.

The fix: review your search terms report weekly, at least for the first few months, and add anything irrelevant to your negative keyword list. This alone can cut wasted spend significantly.

2. Sending every ad to the homepage

A homepage tries to be everything to everyone. Someone who clicked an ad for "emergency plumbing repair" doesn't want your full service list and a mission statement, they want confirmation that you do emergency plumbing repair, in their area, right now.

The fix: send each ad to a landing page that matches the exact thing the ad promised. The tighter the match between ad and page, the higher your conversion rate and the lower Google charges you per click over time.

3. No conversion tracking set up

If you can't see which keywords, ads, or campaigns actually produced a call or a form fill, you're optimizing blind. A lot of accounts we inherit have been running for months with the conversion tracking either never set up, or set up incorrectly so it's counting the wrong thing.

The fix: set up call tracking and form tracking before you spend a dollar on ads, not after. Without it, you genuinely don't know if the campaign is working.

4. Letting Google's automated recommendations run unchecked

Google's ad platform will suggest "optimizations" inside your account, add more keywords, raise your budget, apply this audience, and a lot of business owners click "Apply" assuming Google knows best. Some of these help. A lot of them are designed to increase spend more than they're designed to increase your results.

The fix: review every recommendation before applying it, and understand what it actually changes. If you can't tell whether a suggestion helps you or helps Google's ad revenue, don't apply it blind.

5. Never pausing what isn't working

The keywords, ads, and audiences in your account aren't all performing equally, some are quietly draining budget while a couple of top performers carry the account. Without regularly reviewing performance at the keyword level, underperformers keep spending indefinitely because nobody told them to stop.

The fix: check performance by keyword, not just by campaign, every couple of weeks. Pause what's not converting and shift that budget toward what is.

The bigger picture

None of these fixes require a bigger budget, they require closer attention. A smaller budget spent correctly beats a bigger budget spent carelessly, every time. Most accounts we review have at least one of these five problems, and usually more than one.

If you want us to take an honest look at your account and tell you exactly what we'd change, book a free call. We'll tell you straight what's working, what isn't, and what it would take to fix it, no pressure either way.