Most Australian businesses running Google Ads are wasting between 40 and 60 percent of their budget before a single relevant click happens. The frustrating part? The platform makes it easy to spend — and hard to see where the money goes.
After auditing hundreds of Google Ads accounts across e-commerce, professional services, SaaS, and local businesses, we see the same five mistakes over and over. Here's what they are and — more importantly — how to fix them.
1. Broad Match Without Negative Keywords
Broad match keywords are Google's default. They're also the biggest budget drain for most accounts. When you bid on "accounting software," Google might show your ad for "free accounting software," "accounting software jobs," or "accounting software reviews" — none of which convert for most businesses.
The fix isn't to avoid broad match entirely. Broad match combined with Smart Bidding and a comprehensive negative keyword list is genuinely powerful. But the negative keyword list has to be built before you turn broad match on, not after you've already burned $3,000 learning the hard way.
Pull your Search Terms report for the last 90 days. Filter for any term that has spend but zero conversions. Add those as negatives today. This one action typically reduces wasted spend by 15–25% immediately.
2. Sending Ad Traffic to Your Homepage
Your homepage is designed for browsers. It has navigation, multiple CTAs, brand storytelling, and a dozen different paths a visitor can take. That's exactly wrong for paid traffic, where you've already paid for attention and the goal is a single, specific action.
A dedicated landing page that mirrors the ad's message — same headline, same offer, one CTA — consistently outperforms a homepage by 2–5× on conversion rate. Every dollar you put into ads is worth more when it lands somewhere purpose-built.
The account that sends paid traffic to the homepage is essentially paying for a guided tour when they should be paying for a direct sale.
3. Ignoring Quality Score
Quality Score is Google's rating of how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search. It ranges from 1 to 10, and it directly affects how much you pay per click. A Quality Score of 3 can mean you're paying 2–3× more than a competitor with a Score of 8 for the same position.
Three things drive Quality Score: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Each one is improvable. If you're paying above-market CPCs, Quality Score is almost always part of the reason.
4. Only Running Search Campaigns
Search campaigns capture existing demand — people already looking for what you sell. That's valuable. But for most businesses, the people actively searching represent a small fraction of the total addressable market. The larger opportunity is creating demand among people who don't know you yet but would buy if they did.
Performance Max, YouTube, and Display campaigns all play a role here. The mistake is treating Google Ads as purely a search tool when it's actually a full-funnel platform. Accounts that run search-only miss the majority of the leverage Google's ecosystem can provide.
5. Not Tracking Conversions Correctly
This is the one that stings the most, because it means every optimisation decision you've made could be based on wrong data. Common conversion tracking errors include counting page views as conversions, firing the conversion tag on page load instead of form submission, or not importing offline conversions from your CRM.
Before you change anything in your account, verify your conversion tracking. Use the Google Tag Assistant or the Conversions section in Google Ads to check that your primary conversion actions are firing correctly. Smart Bidding is only as smart as the data you feed it.
Are conversions firing on the thank-you page, not the form page? Are phone calls tracked with a minimum duration (e.g., 60 seconds)? Are you excluding duplicate conversions? Is your primary goal set as "Primary" not "Secondary"?
Where to Start
If you're running Google Ads right now and haven't done a proper account audit in the past six months, start with your Search Terms report and your Conversion tracking. Those two actions alone will tell you more about where your budget is going than any dashboard metric.
If you'd rather have us do it for you, we offer free Google Ads audits for Australian businesses spending more than $3,000/month. We'll give you a full breakdown with specific, prioritised fixes — no obligation to work with us.