How do you know if your Google Ads are set up badly? Run five checks: is your conversion tracking counting real sales, are you showing for searches that have nothing to do with your business, is one campaign quietly eating the whole budget, are your conversions actually button clicks, and is anyone looking at the search terms report. Fail two or more and the account is leaking money, not underperforming.
1. Your conversion tracking is guessing
This is the foundation, so it is first. If you cannot compare the platform's conversion count to your own records and have them roughly match, nothing else on this list is trustworthy, because every other number is built on this one. (Full detail in what conversion tracking is and why most accounts get it wrong.)
2. You are showing for searches that have nothing to do with you
Open the search terms report, the actual phrases people typed, not your keywords. If a plumber is paying for "plumbing salary" or "how to fix a tap yourself," budget is walking out the door. A healthy account has a search terms report that mostly reads like things a paying customer would type.
3. One campaign is eating everything
Sort your campaigns by spend. If a single campaign is taking 80 percent of the budget and returning very little, that is not a strategy, that is a leak with momentum. Budget should follow what converts, not what was set up first.
4. Your conversions are not sales
Look at what each conversion action actually is. "Page view," "button click," and "10 seconds on site" are not conversions, they are activity. If your account is optimizing toward activity, it will get you lots of cheap activity and very few customers.
5. Nobody is reading the search terms report
This is less a setting than a habit. Accounts decay. New junk search terms show up every week, and if no one is in the account cutting them, you are slowly paying more for worse traffic. If the last change in your account history was months ago, that is your answer.
What should I do if I fail two or more of these?
Do not start by raising or cutting the budget. Fix the measurement first, then the targeting, then the spend. Changing the budget on top of broken tracking just changes how fast you lose money. The order matters: honest data, then honest decisions, then more of them.
All writing · Related: What conversion tracking is, and why most accounts get it wrong · Case study: turning a black-box ad account into a watched one