Why Your Google Ads Are Not Working: 7 Mistakes Good PPC Management Puts Right

Why are your Google Ads not working? The seven mistakes behind most wasted UK ad budgets, and how good PPC management puts every one of them right.

If your Google Ads are not working, the cause is nearly always one of seven fixable mistakes: broad match keywords with no negatives, no conversion tracking, traffic sent to the homepage, untested ad copy, an account left to run itself, an ignored search terms report, or a budget too small for the auction. Good PPC management is the craft of catching all seven before they cost you real money.

We audit Google Ads accounts every week at MDH. Different industries, different budgets, different levels of sighing in the first call. And yet the same seven mistakes turn up almost every time, like a villain with exactly one trick.

So we have started treating them as crimes. Each one gets a severity rating, from misdemeanour to felony. None of them means anyone was daft, by the way. Google Ads is built to be easy to start and expensive to run badly, and the platform will never write to tell you something is quietly eating your budget. That is where the nerdy detectives come in. Consider us your nerds in shining armour, with a clipboard.

Why are your Google Ads not working?

The short answer: your budget is probably leaking through one or more of seven common mistakes, and every single one of them is fixable. Together they are the difference between ads that bring customers and ads that just bring invoices.

Here is the charge sheet.

Let us walk the beat.

Crime 1: Why are broad match keywords wasting my money?

The short answer: broad match tells Google to show your ad for anything it thinks is related, and without a negative keyword list you pay for the "anything" part.

A glazing firm bidding on "glass" can end up paying for people hunting wine glasses. A removals company can fund clicks about emotional removals of the Netflix variety. Negative keywords are how you tell Google what you are not. An account without them is a shop that pays passers-by to wander in and leave.

If negative keywords are a new phrase to you, our plain English dictionary at https://www.mydigitalhero.co.uk/jargon-buster translates it without judgement.

Crime 2: What happens if I have no conversion tracking?

The short answer: nothing good. Without conversion tracking you have no idea which keywords, ads or audiences turn into enquiries, so you cannot cut the losers or back the winners.

This is the felony on the list. Spending money on ads without tracking is like running a shop with the lights off and guessing which shelves sell. Everything feels like it might be working, which is exactly the problem. Fixing tracking is almost always the first job in any account we take over, because every other decision depends on it.

Curious how the rest of your marketing scores while you are at it? Our free two minute Marketing MOT at https://www.mydigitalhero.co.uk/the-marketing-mot will tell you, politely.

Crime 3: Why should ads not go to my homepage?

The short answer: because the homepage is built for everyone, and an ad click is someone specific. Send them to a page about the exact thing they searched for and more of them will act.

Your homepage has a lot of jobs. Greeting a person who searched "emergency boiler repair Leeds" is not one of them. A dedicated landing page answers the exact question the visitor paid Google to ask you, which is why it converts better. Same traffic, same spend, more customers.

Crime 4: Do I really need to test my ad copy?

The short answer: yes, because you are otherwise guessing which message works, and the market is far better at answering that than any of us.

Running one ad per group is a quiet little tragedy. Two ads, one question, a few weeks of data, and the stronger message wins on evidence rather than opinion. We find this part of the job properly satisfying. It is a tiny science experiment that pays its own lab fees.

Crime 5: What is wrong with setting up ads and leaving them?

The short answer: Google Ads is an auction that changes every day, so an account nobody touches drifts towards waste. Weekly attention is the minimum. Daily is better.

Costs shift. Competitors arrive. Search habits move. An account left alone does not stay the same, it slowly gets worse while the invoices stay the same size. That is the con of "set it and forget it". You are not saving management time. You are just paying the auction to make your decisions for you.

Crime 6: What is the search terms report and why does it matter?

The short answer: it is the list of the real searches that triggered your ads, and it tells you exactly what you are paying for. Most accounts never open it.

This is honestly our favourite report in all of marketing. A verbatim list of what real people typed before they met you. Free market research, updated daily. Reading it is how you discover your "luxury conservatory" budget has been funding searches for greenhouse parts. We read these for fun, which tells you everything you need to know about our weekends.

Crime 7: Can my budget be too small for Google Ads?

The short answer: yes. If your daily budget buys two clicks in a market where it takes twenty clicks to win a customer, the maths cannot rescue you.

This one is a caution rather than a crime, because it usually comes from sensible instincts. Start small, test the water. But bidding in the wrong weight class just produces slow, expensive disappointment. Sometimes the right answer is a different channel entirely, and an honest agency will say so.

What does good PPC management actually look like?

The short answer: someone watching the account daily, cutting waste before it compounds, testing constantly, and reporting in plain English on cost per lead rather than clicks.

At MDH that someone is Jared, our paid ads manager, who checks accounts daily rather than monthly and treats the search terms report as breakfast reading. The results of that sort of attention can be dramatic. For Northumbria Cars, we cut the cost per click by 98 per cent. Same platform, same market. The difference was management.

PPC management comes as part of Hero+, our all-in-one subscription, alongside SEO, content and design, from £2,499 a month. Ad spend is billed separately and paid by you, directly to Google, from an account you own.

You can see how we run paid ads at https://www.mydigitalhero.co.uk/google-ads and the full subscription at https://www.mydigitalhero.co.uk/hero

If you suspect one of the seven crimes is being committed in your account right now, we will happily take a look. A free Google Ads audit, no lecture included, starts at https://www.mydigitalhero.co.uk/contact

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