7 Google Ads Fixes That Stop Burning Budget in 30 Days
- Pretty-Impressive
- Feb 8
- 6 min read
Updated: Feb 14
Summary
Stop paying for the wrong searches, the wrong clicks, and the wrong “conversions.” Then you can scale without lying to yourself. This is how we 10x our client PPC performance.
Table of contents
Key takeaways
Use Search terms weekly to find waste and new intent.
Fix negative keywords and match types before you “add budget.”
Treat Quality Score alignment as a profit lever, not trivia.
Tip 1: Run a weekly Search Terms loop (not “monthly when I remember”)
What to do: Pull Search terms, label winners, block losers, and spin winners into their own ad groups.
This works because the Search terms report shows what people actually typed, not what you hoped they typed. When you review it weekly, you catch waste early, before it trains the algorithm on junk traffic. You also find “surprise” high-intent phrases that deserve their own keywords and ads.
When this is overlooked, budgets drift into vague queries, lead quality drops, and you start “optimizing” ads instead of fixing intent.
If you cannot name your top 10 converting queries this month, you are flying blind.
Question: Why not let broad match handle it?
Answer: Broad match can work, but only when you police Search terms consistently.
Tip 2: Build negative keywords like a bouncer, not a suggestion box
What to do: Add negatives for research intent, jobs intent, DIY intent, and competitor curiosity that never converts.
Negative keywords prevent ads from showing for unwanted searches.
This is effective because negatives protect your spend from “close enough” matching. They also reduce noise in your conversion data, which improves automated bidding decisions over time.
Negatives are one of the few levers that directly lowers wasted impressions and clicks without touching bids. When ignored, you pay to educate the market for free, and you convince yourself the market is “bad,” when your filtering is bad.
Quick check: Look at your last 100 clicks. How many were obviously wrong on sight?
Question: Is this still useful with Performance Max?
Answer: Yes, but the workflow is different, so document what you block and why.
“Your market share is everybody else’s operating margin.” — Warren Jenson, former Amazon CFO
Your best growth lever is often your competitors’ waste.
Use Search terms + negatives + tracking cleanup to remove waste first, then scale what survives.
Tip 3: One intent per ad group, or your ads will stay generic forever
What to do: Split ad groups by customer intent theme, not by “how we like to organize services.”
This works because tighter themes let you write ads that match the searcher’s goal in plain English. That raises relevance, improves click quality, and makes your landing page promise cleaner. It also gives you better diagnostics. You can see which intent is failing instead of guessing.
When overlooked, you end up with average ads, average clicks, average leads, and you blame Google for what is really your structure.
Can one ad group honestly answer one question?
Question: Is SKAG still required?
Answer: Not always. The rule is intent clarity, not purity.
If you want this built fast, Pretty-Impressive can run the full system:
Fix what's currently broken
Aggressive KW segmentation by customer intent and behavior
Analysis and optimization around what happens after someone clicks the ad. Instead of 1 out 100 visitors contact you, let's do 1 out of 50.
We’ve worked with everyone from Midas, CP Chem, and BBVA Compass Bank to local food trucks, ecommerce brands, and VC-backed companies, including helping grow two unicorns from the ground up.
ChatGPT Ads Management <>
Tip 4: Treat Quality Score alignment like a profit lever
What to do: Make keyword, ad copy, and landing page say the same thing, using the same language.
Quality Score is an estimate tied to ad, keyword, and landing page quality. This works because alignment reduces the “translation gap” between what was searched and what was delivered. When users instantly see the match, they click with intent, and they convert more often. Better alignment also reduces the need to brute-force results with higher bids.
When ignored, you pay more per click for lower-quality traffic, and you never get stable performance.
Does your landing page headline repeat the core query’s promise?
Question: Is Quality Score still real?
Answer: The number is not magic, but the inputs are still the game. We have to play by the rules to appease our Google Ads Algorithm Gods.
Tip 5: Do a conversion tracking sanity check before you “optimize”
What to do: Pick one primary conversion, verify it fires once, and confirm it matches real business value.
This works because Google can only optimize toward what you tell it is success. Bad conversion setup trains bidding toward garbage, like page views, duplicate fires, or low-intent form starts. Once tracking is clean, automated bidding stops chasing fake wins.
When overlooked, you get “great” dashboard performance and a dead phone.
Compare leads in Ads vs. your CRM for the same week. If it is not close, stop and fix tracking.
Question: Should I track every micro action?
Answer: You can, but do not let micro actions become the primary goal.
Tip 6: Speed up the landing page, but not too extreme
What to do: Improve mobile load time, simplify the first screen, and remove distractions.
This works because slow pages bleed intent. Even small load delays can cut conversion rate, and Google has published benchmarks showing meaningful drops as load time increases. You also reduce “bounce then research” behavior when your first screen answers the question fast.
However, never not prioritize load speed over effective content. Some web devs claim adding google analytics tags, google tag manager tags, and meta pixels slow down the page to unacceptable speeds. Resulting in you having zero insights on user behavior on the page. That is absurd silo'd vision for how to run a business, and should be an instant red flag against your web developer.
Open your page on LTE. Count seconds until the headline is readable.
Question: Is speed only a dev problem?
No. Heavy video, sliders, and bloated scripts are marketing choices too.
Tip 7: Segment by geo intent so you stop paying for “interested in” clicks
What to do: Separate campaigns for core service areas vs. “maybe someday” areas, and write geo-specific ads and proof.
Location settings can include people nearby or those showing interest in a location.
This works because geo intent is not binary. Some users are physically local, others are remote but researching, and their conversion behavior differs. Segmenting lets you control bids, messaging, and landing pages by reality, not hope.
When overlooked, you fund clicks from people who were never going to buy locally, then you call it a lead quality problem.
Quick check: Look at location reports. Do you see clusters that never convert?
Question: Do I need separate landing pages by city?
Not always, but you need separate proof and copy blocks.
FAQ
How often should I review Search terms?
Weekly for most accounts. Twice weekly if spend is high.
Do negative keywords still matter with automation?
Yes. They protect budget and protect training data.
What is the fastest way to improve lead quality?
Block bad intent first, then isolate high intent into focused ad groups.
Should I rebuild everything at once?
No. Fix tracking and intent leakage first, then restructure in phases.
Sources
Platform documentation
Related resources from Pretty-Impressive.com
Closing summary
Most Google Ads accounts fail for boring reasons. Wrong queries, weak filtering, messy tracking, slow pages. Fix the boring parts, and performance looks “magical” again.
If you want help applying this to your account, start with the Search terms loop and a tracking audit. Those two steps alone usually reveal the real problem fast.
How to run Google Ads? Hiring us so you can focus on your business operations.
Pretty-Impressive builds Google ads systems that convert. We’ve worked with everyone from Midas, CP Chem, and BBVA Compass Bank to local food trucks, ecommerce brands, and VC-backed companies, including helping grow two unicorns from the ground up.
Sure, you can probably learn how to be a strategy PPC tactician yourself. But your time as a business owner is better spent working on the business, hiring people, solving inventory and operations problems, rather than in the business turning thousands of wrenches. There's not that much time in the day.
