By: Susan Yen, PPC Strategist
Are you seeing your Google Ads budget disappear faster than a slice of pizza at a party? With the rise of AI and new campaign types like Performance Max, it's easy to overlook fundamental mistakes that can silently drain your ad spend. Even seasoned professionals can fall victim to these oversights.
This article will highlight common PPC pitfalls that are still bleeding budgets in 2025, providing you with a checklist to ensure your campaigns are as efficient and effective as possible.
Here's what we'll dive into:
The Power of the Basics: Why foundational campaign setup remains critical, even with advanced AI.
Navigating Google's Auto-Applies: Which automated recommendations to embrace and which to carefully manage.
Mastering Match Types and Targeting: Ensuring your ads reach the right audience in the right places.
Conversion Tracking is King: The absolute necessity of accurate measurement for informed optimization.
Beyond Conversions: Key Metrics that Matter: A holistic view of your campaign's health.
In the rush to adopt the latest AI features and campaign types, it's easy to forget that a strong foundation is still key. Think of your Google Ads account like a house: if the foundation is shaky, no amount of fancy decor or smart technology will prevent it from eventually leaking budget.
Here are the foundational elements you absolutely cannot ignore:
Clear Campaign Goals: Before you even set up a campaign, ask yourself and your client: what is the primary objective? Is it to drive purchases, generate leads, increase website traffic, or build brand awareness? Your goal dictates the best campaign type. Trying to get purchases with a display campaign, for example, might not be the most effective approach.
Proper Campaign Structure: Your account structure is the blueprint of your house. A well-organized structure prevents internal competition and ensures your ads are relevant. This means logically grouping campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. A messy structure leads to duplicate efforts and wasted spend.
Channel Alignment: Not every business thrives on every advertising channel. While Google is powerful, consider if it's the right fit for your specific business goals and target audience. Ensure you're meeting your audience where they are, whether that's Google, Microsoft Ads, social media, or other platforms.
When conducting an audit, always start by checking these foundational elements. A quick review of your settings and how campaigns are organized can reveal immediate opportunities for improvement before you even dig into more granular data.
As AI becomes more integrated into Google Ads, "auto-applies" are becoming more prevalent. These are Google's automated recommendations that can be automatically implemented into your account. While some can be helpful, others can quietly lead to significant budget waste if not carefully managed.
Here are the auto-applies to pay close attention to:
Housekeeping Auto-Applies to Consider Keeping On:
Keyword Targeting (Removing Duplicate Keywords): This can save you time by preventing ads from competing against each other within your own account.
Removing Non-Serving Keywords: If keywords aren't performing, removing them can free up budget for more effective terms.
Removing Conflicting Keywords: This helps avoid situations where multiple campaigns or ad groups bid on the same terms, leading to unnecessary internal competition and higher costs.
Auto-Applies to Approach with Caution (or Turn Off):
Optimizing Ad Rotations (Automatically Adding Ads): While AI is improving, it still might not capture the nuances of your brand's messaging or the specific intent of your audience as well as human-crafted ad copy. You want control over your ad messaging to ensure relevancy from keyword to ad copy to landing page.
Optimized Targeting/Broad Match Expansion: While broad match can be powerful with the right guardrails, allowing Google to automatically expand your targeting without oversight can quickly lead to irrelevant traffic and wasted spend. Always review broad match performance in your search terms report and add negatives as needed.
Remember, your job as a PPC professional is to provide guardrails for the AI, not to hand over complete control. Regularly review your auto-apply settings and ensure they align with your business goals and budget.
Even with advanced AI, fundamental targeting controls are vital to preventing budget bleed.
Match Types: The ongoing debate around broad match continues. While broad match is often a default, especially in new campaign setups, it can be a "silent killer" if not managed. Broad match can work, but it requires diligent monitoring and a robust negative keyword strategy. Don't simply "set it and forget it."
Review Search Terms Regularly: If you're using broad match, frequently review your search terms report to identify irrelevant queries and add them as negative keywords. This is also a treasure trove for finding new, high-quality keywords that your audience is actually using.
Location Targeting: This is a common oversight that can lead to significant wasted spend.
"People in Your Targeted Locations" vs. "People in, Regularly in, or Who've Shown Interest in Your Targeted Locations": This small setting can dramatically impact who sees your ads. For local businesses, targeting people in your location is often far more efficient than including those merely interested in it.
Specific Locations: Targeting the entire country when your business serves a specific city or region is a surefire way to waste money. Consistently confirm your location settings with your clients.
This cannot be stressed enough: if your conversion tracking isn't accurate, you're essentially flying blind. All your optimization efforts will be based on flawed data, leading to poor decisions and wasted budget.
Track Actual Completed Events: Ensure you're tracking meaningful actions like purchases, completed lead forms, or phone calls, not just page views (unless traffic is your only goal).
Avoid Duplication: Double-check that conversions aren't being double-counted. This can inflate your conversion numbers, making your campaign seem more successful than it is, and can mislead AI-driven campaigns like Performance Max into optimizing for incorrect goals. Tools like Google Tag Manager (GTM) can help streamline and organize your tracking setup to prevent these issues.
Quality of Conversions: Regularly communicate with your clients about the quality of the conversions they're receiving. Are the leads genuine? Are the sales profitable? If your internal metrics look great but the client reports low-quality outcomes, there's a disconnect that needs to be addressed. Your data should reflect their business reality.
Monitor for Breakage: Websites change. New buttons are added. Make sure your conversion tracking is updated whenever website changes occur to ensure continuous, accurate data collection.
While conversions are paramount, don't hyper-focus on them to the exclusion of other vital metrics. A healthy campaign considers the entire funnel.
Cost Per Click (CPC): If your CPCs are excessively high without corresponding results, you need to investigate. Are your keywords too expensive for the value they provide? Are you competing inefficiently?
Conversion Rate (CVR): A low conversion rate, despite decent clicks, often points to a landing page issue. Are users arriving on your site but not completing the desired action? This signals a need to review your landing page's relevance, user experience, and calls to action. Don't spend money driving traffic to a leaky bucket.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): A low CTR might indicate issues with your ad copy's relevance or appeal. Are your ads compelling enough to encourage clicks?
Bounce Rate (from Analytics): A high bounce rate from your ad traffic suggests that the landing page content isn't meeting user expectations based on the ad they clicked.
Review these metrics regularly, but don't make impulsive daily changes. Give the account time to learn, typically optimizing weekly or bi-weekly.
To recap and provide a practical checklist for avoiding common PPC mistakes:
Campaign/Account Level Negatives: Implement comprehensive negative keyword lists to filter out irrelevant searches. Utilize account-level negative lists where appropriate.
Brand Exclusions: For Performance Max and other broad campaign types, ensure you're excluding your own brand terms if you have a separate brand campaign. You don't want to bid against yourself.
Content Exclusions: For Display and Video campaigns, apply content exclusions to avoid showing ads on irrelevant or low-quality websites/videos.
Better Shopping Feeds: For e-commerce, ensure your product feeds are optimized with fresh, detailed information and high-quality visuals.
First-Party Data for Targeting: Leverage your own customer data for remarketing and audience targeting. This often leads to higher quality leads and conversions.
Consistent Monitoring: Regularly check search terms for quality, watch for traffic pattern shifts, and stay updated with Google's ongoing AI developments.
New AI features and automation are emerging all the time in PPC. While these advancements are powerful tools, the fundamental principles of strategic setup, diligent monitoring, and accurate measurement remain the bedrock of successful campaigns. By focusing on these basics and maintaining smart guardrails, you can stop budget bleed and ensure your PPC efforts drive profitable growth in 2025 and beyond.
Susan Yen is a PPC strategist with 7+ years' experience helping brands grow through data-driven campaigns.
You can find her on LinkedIn