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.
Each check below says where to click and what a bad answer looks like. Google moves its menus from time to time; the paths here are the ones its own help pages gave in October 2026.
1. Your conversion tracking is guessing
This is the foundation, so it is first. Conversion tracking is the count Google Ads keeps of what happened after someone clicked your ad: a sale, a call, a form sent. Click the Goals icon, then Conversions, then Summary. You will see your conversion actions with a recent count for each. Pull your own sales or lead numbers for the same dates, from your invoices, inbox or booking system, and compare.
If the two are roughly in line, this check passes. If Google's number is far higher than anything you can match to real customers, or an action shows no recent activity at all, nothing else on this list can be trusted, 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 before your ad showed, not the keywords you chose. Click Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. If a plumber is paying for "plumbing salary" or "how to fix a tap yourself," budget is walking out the door. A healthy report mostly reads like things a paying customer would type.
3. One campaign is eating everything
On the Campaigns page, add the Cost column if it is not showing, and sort by it. Compare what the top campaign spends with how many conversions it returns. If one campaign takes most of the budget and returns 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
Back in Goals, Conversions, Summary, read the name of each conversion action being counted and what it actually records. "Page view," "button click," and "10 seconds on site" are not conversions, they are activity someone labelled as one. An account optimizing toward activity will get you lots of cheap activity and very few customers. A conversion should be something close to a sale or a real lead: a purchase, a completed booking, a sent quote request.
5. Nobody is reading the search terms report
This is less a setting than a habit. Click Campaigns, then Change history: the log of every edit made to the account and when. Accounts decay. New junk search terms show up every week, and if nobody is in the account cutting them, you slowly pay more for worse traffic. If the last change was months ago, that is your answer, whatever you have been told about the account being "managed".
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.
What these five checks cannot tell you
These checks are built for an owner to run alone, and they catch the failures that are plain once you know where to look. They will not catch everything. From inside one account it is hard to tell whether your bidding strategy is fighting your budget, whether a Performance Max campaign is spending well or just spending, or whether the account's structure is working against you in a way no single number shows. That usually takes someone who has looked inside more than one account.
That is what a second look is for: not a replacement for the five checks, but the step after them. If you want one, send me your website, and I will tell you what I can and cannot see from outside, and the first thing I would fix. What a free check like that can honestly cover is in what a free Google Ads audit actually gets you.
All writing · Related: Your Google Ads stopped running. Nobody told you. · Case study: a vacation-rental ad account, from nine dark days to a daily check