I Audited 10 UK Small Business Google Ads Accounts. Here's What I Found in Every Single One.

Every time I sit down to audit a Google Ads account for a UK small business, I tell myself this one might be different. Maybe this one has clean conversion tracking. Maybe the search terms report is actually being reviewed. Maybe someone checked the location settings before going live.

It never is different. Not really. I've audited accounts spending anywhere from £500 to £8,000 a month and the same problems show up so reliably I could write this post from memory. Which is kind of what I'm doing.

Problem one: the campaign is optimising for the wrong conversion event

This is the one that causes the most damage and is the hardest to notice because everything looks fine on the surface. Campaigns are running. Conversions are being recorded. The platform says it's working.

But when I pull up the conversion actions and look at what's actually being counted, I almost always find the same thing: form fills, page views, or session starts being counted as conversions. Sometimes all three combined. I spoke to a prospect recently — a lead gen business — whose campaigns were counting every visit to the contact page as a conversion. Not form completions. Page visits. The algorithm had spent months learning how to find people who click on contact pages.

Problem two: broad match keywords eating the budget

Almost every account I audit has broad match keywords running with no meaningful negative keyword list. I've seen a solar installation company showing ads for 'solar panel replacement instructions,' a commercial construction firm appearing for 'how to become a construction manager,' and a B2B software company spending money on searches from job seekers.

For a brand new account, I start with a negative list of at least 50–80 terms before the campaign even goes live. By month two that list is usually 150+.

Problem three: ads sending traffic to the homepage

This one is everywhere. An ad for a specific service — 'commercial cleaning contracts London' — clicks through to the company homepage. The visitor has to find the commercial cleaning section themselves. Most of them don't bother. The homepage problem costs money twice — once in wasted clicks, once in inflated auction costs from poor Quality Scores.

Problem four: location targeting set to 'presence or interest'

Google defaults to 'presence or interest' and almost nobody changes it. What it means: your ads can show to people who are interested in your target location, not just people who are physically in it. For a local service business, this means you can be spending budget showing ads to people in other countries who have recently searched for something related to your city.

The fix takes thirty seconds. Campaign Settings → Location Options → change to 'Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.' Done.

Problem five: evaluating everything on last click

The business owner looks at the Google Ads dashboard, sees the cost per conversion, and makes budget decisions entirely on that number. For a B2B business with a longer sales cycle, or any business where people research on mobile and convert on desktop, that number is a significant undercount of what Google Ads is actually driving.

I always tell clients: look at the trend, not just the absolute number. Is CPL improving month on month? Is lead quality improving? Is branded search volume growing? These questions matter more than a single CPL figure in isolation.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. But together, they add up to a campaign that spends money without clear results. In almost every case I've looked at, Google Ads wasn't the problem. The setup was.

If any of this sounds familiar and you want me to look at your account specifically — book a free strategy call here: https://calendly.com/freelancersaurav11/free-strategy-call