TL;DR: If your Google Ads “aren’t working”, the problem usually isn’t bad luck or a small budget. It is a handful of default settings quietly spending your money on clicks that were never going to become customers. Studies suggest most local businesses waste somewhere between a third and a half of their ad budget this way, and a surprising number have no conversion tracking at all, so they cannot even see it happening. Below are the seven culprits, and the fixes. Want us to find the leaks in your account for free? Book a marketing review.
“We tried Google Ads and it didn’t work”
It is one of the most common things we hear from local business owners. They spent a few hundred or a few thousand pounds, the phone didn’t ring enough to justify it, and they quietly switched the campaign off, convinced Google Ads doesn’t work for a business like theirs.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: Google Ads almost certainly does work for your business. What usually fails is the setup. The platform’s default settings are designed to spend your budget quickly and broadly, which is excellent for Google’s revenue and often terrible for a small advertiser. Left unchecked, those defaults can pour a large slice of your budget into job seekers, students, DIY researchers, price-shoppers in other towns, and people who will never pick up the phone.
By most estimates, the average local advertiser wastes between 30% and 50% of their spend on clicks that were never going to convert. The good news is that waste is fixable, and you do not need a bigger budget to fix it. You need the right settings.
The 7 settings quietly draining your budget
1. You have no conversion tracking (so you are flying blind)
This is the big one. In a well-known analysis of 500 small-business Google Ads accounts, fewer than half had conversion tracking properly installed. That means more than half were paying for clicks with no idea which ones produced an enquiry, a call, or a sale.
Without conversion tracking, Google’s automated bidding optimises for clicks instead of customers, and you optimise for nothing at all because you cannot see what is working. Fix this first. Everything else depends on it.
2. Broad match keywords with no negative keyword list
Broad match lets Google show your ad for anything it considers “related”. Combined with its newer AI matching, your “emergency plumber” ad can show for “plumbing apprenticeship”, “plumbing courses” or “how to fix a tap”. Each irrelevant click costs you money.
The defence is a negative keyword list: words and phrases you never want to pay for (“free”, “jobs”, “DIY”, “course”, “salary”, competitor towns, and so on). Most well-run accounts have dozens of these as a baseline. Many struggling accounts have none. Tightening this alone can cut cost per lead for a local service business by up to 30%.
3. You send clicks to your homepage
Your homepage is built for everyone, which makes it perfect for no one. When someone clicks an ad for a specific service, then lands on a general homepage and has to hunt for what they wanted, many simply leave, and you have paid for the privilege.
Send each ad to a focused landing page that matches the search, with one clear action. This single change often lifts conversions more than any bidding tweak.
4. Search Partners and Display Expansion are switched on
By default, Google often opts you into showing ads across its Search Partner sites and expanding into the Display Network. For many local advertisers this quietly siphons budget to low-intent placements with little to show for it. Review these settings and switch off what you cannot justify.
5. Performance Max with no guardrails
Performance Max can be powerful, but it is also where budgets vanish without anyone noticing. It spreads your money across Search, Display, YouTube and Gmail, and it does not clearly report how much goes where. Your campaign might be spending the majority of its budget on Display and YouTube while you assume it is competing on Search.
On smaller budgets, and without negative keywords, audience signals and asset discipline, Performance Max often becomes the single biggest source of waste in the account. It needs guardrails, not blind trust.
6. You are bidding to “maximise clicks” or chase the top spot
Bidding strategies sound technical, but the principle is simple: if you tell Google to maximise clicks, it will get you lots of clicks, not necessarily customers. Bidding to always be top of the page does the same thing while inflating your costs. Once conversion tracking is in place (see number one), you can bid towards conversions instead, which is what your business actually cares about.
7. “Set and forget”
Google Ads is not a slow cooker. Search terms change, new irrelevant queries appear every week, and competitors shift their bids. Accounts that are reviewed once a quarter, or never, accumulate weeks of waste between check-ins. A few minutes each week reviewing the actual search terms that triggered your ads, and adding negatives, keeps the account lean.
How to spot the waste in your own account
You can get a feel for this in ten minutes. Check whether conversion tracking is active and recording real enquiries. Open your search terms report and look for queries that have nothing to do with what you sell. See where your Performance Max budget is actually going. Confirm your ads point to focused pages, not the homepage.
If that sounds like a lot, we have turned it into a simple checklist: The Google Ads Waste Audit. It walks you through twelve quick checks, tells you what each result means, and shows you the first fixes to make. Grab it here.
Frequently asked questions
The quickest tells are no conversion tracking, a search terms report full of irrelevant queries, ads pointing at your homepage, and a Performance Max campaign you cannot fully see into. Any one of these usually means budget is leaking.
Usually not. Plenty of local businesses succeed on modest budgets. Far more often the issue is wasted spend: a small budget with 40% waste behaves like an even smaller one. Fix the leaks and the same budget works much harder.
No. Broad match can work well, but only with strong conversion tracking and a well-maintained negative keyword list to keep the irrelevant traffic out. Without those guardrails, it tends to spend fast and convert poorly.
It can, but with care. On small budgets and without proper setup and oversight, Performance Max often wastes more than it returns. It rewards discipline in the first few weeks and ongoing management after that.
Find your leaks before you spend another pound
Every pound your campaign wastes on the wrong click is a pound that never had a chance to bring you a customer. The frustrating part is that most of this waste is invisible from the inside, which is exactly why so many owners conclude that “Google Ads doesn’t work”.
We will happily look under the bonnet for you. A Free Marketing Review with Chris includes a plain-English look at where your budget is actually going, the biggest leaks we can see, and the fixes that will get more customers from the same spend. No pressure, no jargon.
Book your Free Marketing Review →
Broxbourne Marketing grows leads and sales for local service businesses through websites, SEO, GEO/AI optimisation, Google Ads and social media. See how we help →
