There is a particular frustration that comes with running Google Ads as a small business owner. You are spending money. Clicks are happening. The campaigns show as active. And yet — the phone is not ringing at the rate you would expect, the enquiries feel inconsistent, and you cannot quite put your finger on what is wrong.
Usually, what is wrong is not visible in the summary view Google shows you. It is buried in the settings, in the search terms, in what Google has quietly been doing with your budget while you were focused on running your actual business.
These are the seven signs we find most often — and the ones most business owners never know to look for. Each one below includes a "where to check" — a specific place in your account you can look right now. These checks will tell you whether something needs attention. What a full audit does is go significantly deeper: cross-referencing what each finding means in the context of your whole account, not just one report in isolation.
Haven't read Part 1 of this series? Start with whether a Google Ads audit makes sense for your business at all.
Read Part 1 →This is the most common finding in SME account audits — and the most damaging. The number of conversions reported in Google Ads simply does not match the actual business reality. More enquiries in the platform than in the inbox. More "calls" than anyone actually received. More "leads" than the CRM ever saw.
What is usually happening: the account is counting the wrong things as conversions. A visit to a contact page counted as a lead. A button click tracked as a sale. A phone number impression counted as a connected call. These all look like wins inside Google Ads. They are not wins for your business. And because Smart Bidding uses conversion data to decide where to spend your budget, feeding it the wrong signals means it keeps optimising toward the wrong outcomes — confidently, automatically, and at your expense.
A dental clinic we reviewed had 11 active conversion actions, 7 of which were set to "optimise for bidding." One of them was tracking visits to the appointment confirmation page — but also firing on the homepage on mobile due to a tag error. Google thought every mobile visitor was a confirmed appointment. The algorithm had been chasing homepage traffic for months.
In Google Ads, go to Goals → Conversions. Look at each active conversion action. Ask yourself: does this represent a genuine business outcome — a real enquiry, a real sale, a real call? If any are tracking page views, button clicks, or session events as primary conversions, that is a problem worth investigating. Spotting the mismatch is the easy part — tracing exactly which tags are misfiring, which bidding strategies were affected, and how long the bad data has been in the system is where a proper account review earns its cost.
The Search Terms report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads — not the keywords you chose, but what people actually typed before clicking. For many small business accounts, this report is a revelation. And rarely a comfortable one.
A roofing contractor bidding on "roof repair" might find their ads triggered by "roof repair DIY guide," "how much does roof repair cost to do yourself," or "roof repair training course." A law firm bidding on "personal injury lawyer" might see "personal injury lawyer salary" and "how to become a personal injury lawyer" in the list. Real clicks. Real cost. Zero commercial intent.
This happens because Google's broad match keyword type — which Google increasingly defaults to and recommends — interprets keywords loosely, matching to anything it considers semantically related. Without a well-maintained negative keyword list, your ads reach audiences your business has no use for.
Go to Insights & Reports → Search Terms. Filter the last 30 days. Scroll through the actual queries. If more than 15–20% are searches you would never want to pay for, your match types and negative keyword list need serious attention.
When you create a Search campaign in Google Ads, there is a setting called "Display Network" that is turned on by default. It is easy to miss. It means Google can show your text ads as banner-style ads across its network of partner websites — including mobile apps, news sites, and content platforms — alongside your intended search placements.
For a local plumbing business, this might mean paying for banner impressions on a recipe blog or a mobile game. For a B2B software company, it might mean ads served to general consumers scrolling entertainment content. The intent is completely different from a genuine search, and the conversion rates reflect that — usually significantly worse than pure search traffic, quietly dragging down overall account performance.
Google frames this as "expanding your reach." In practice, for most small business accounts, it expands wasted spend more than it expands results.
Go to your Search campaign settings. Under Networks, check whether "Display Network" is ticked. If it is, and you did not consciously choose it, that is a setting worth reviewing. Also check your Placements report to see exactly where your ads have been serving.
Google has a feature called Auto-applied Recommendations. When enabled, it allows Google to make changes to your account automatically — adding keywords, expanding match types, adjusting bids, creating new ads — without requiring your approval each time. The feature is presented as a time-saver. For accounts without active management, it can cause real problems.
An HVAC business we reviewed had auto-applied recommendations enabled and did not know it. Over four months, Google had broadened six phrase match keywords to broad match, added 34 new keywords the business had never evaluated, and paused two of their strongest ad groups for "low activity." None of these changes were requested. All of them had measurable impact on performance.
The point is not that Google's suggestions are always wrong. Sometimes they are useful. The point is that changes to your account should be deliberate choices — not something happening in the background while you are not looking.
Go to Recommendations in the left navigation, then click Auto-apply at the top. Review which categories are toggled on. Then check Change History in the left navigation panel — filter by "Source: Automated" to see what Google has changed on your behalf.
Performance Max — or PMax — is Google's newest and most automated campaign type. Google strongly promotes it and in many cases will recommend it as the primary campaign for your account. It runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and Discover simultaneously, letting Google's algorithm decide where and how to show your ads.
Used well, with strong audience signals and clean conversion data, it can perform. Used as a default setup — which is how most small business accounts run it — it frequently cannibalises your branded search traffic (showing ads to people who were already going to find you), spends heavily on YouTube and Display placements with poor commercial intent, and provides almost no transparency about what it is actually doing.
The visibility issue is real. Unlike a standard Search campaign where you can see exactly which keywords triggered which ads, PMax gives you very limited search term data and minimal placement reporting. If you cannot see where your budget is going, you cannot evaluate whether it is working.
In a PMax campaign, go to Insights to see Search Categories and asset performance. Check whether your PMax campaign is capturing brand traffic by looking for your business name in the search categories. Also check whether you have audience signals added — without them, Google is targeting entirely on its own judgment. That said, PMax reporting is deliberately limited — even experienced advertisers cannot see everything it is doing from inside the interface. A full audit cross-references PMax spend against your Search campaign data to surface the cannibalisation and placement patterns that the standard reports do not show.
There is a report inside Google Ads called Auction Insights. It shows you, for any campaign or ad group, who else is appearing in the same auctions as you — and how your impression share, overlap rate, and position above rate compare to theirs. Most small business owners have never opened it.
When a business notices a competitor appearing more frequently — in their own searches, from customer feedback, in market conversations — the instinct is often to increase budget. But the actual problem might be something different: a competitor improved their Quality Score, eroding your position without any change in bids. Or your Impression Share Lost due to budget has been climbing quietly, meaning your ads simply are not showing for a significant portion of relevant searches because daily budgets are exhausted too early in the day.
A car rental business came to us convinced they needed to outspend a competitor. The Auction Insights report showed their competitor only had a 34% overlap rate — they were not even in the same auctions most of the time. The real issue was the business's own budget being depleted by mid-morning, leaving the afternoon — their peak booking window — completely uncovered.
Select a campaign, then go to Insights & Reports → Auction Insights. Review your Impression Share and Lost IS (Budget) metrics. If Lost IS (Budget) is above 20%, your ads are not showing for a meaningful portion of relevant searches due to budget constraints — not competition.
Google Ads is not a set-and-forget system. Search behaviour shifts. Competitors adjust. Seasonal patterns change. Google updates its platform. An account that was well-configured a year ago may not be well-configured today — not because anything was broken, but because the context around it moved and the account did not.
The Change History report is one of the most honest views available in any Google Ads account. It shows every change made, by whom, and when. In healthy, actively managed accounts, it shows a consistent pattern of updates — keyword refinements, bid adjustments, negative additions, ad copy tests. In neglected accounts, it shows long gaps. Or worse: it shows that the only recent changes were made automatically by Google.
Neither situation is an emergency on its own. But an account that nobody has actively managed in six months has almost certainly drifted from where it needs to be — and an audit is the fastest way to find out by how much.
In the left navigation panel, click Change History. Set the date range to the last 90 days. Look at the frequency and type of changes. If the list is sparse — or if most entries show "Source: Automated" — that tells you something important about how much human attention the account has been getting.
How many of these sounded familiar?
If two or more did — an independent review of your account will almost certainly find something worth acting on.
One More Thing Worth Saying
None of these signs mean your campaigns are a failure. They mean your account was set up by a human — or by Google's setup wizard — at a point in time, and has not been reviewed since. That is entirely normal. It is the default state for most small business accounts.
What makes these signs worth paying attention to is that they are all fixable. None of them require starting over. An audit surfaces exactly which ones apply to your account, how significant each one is, and what to do about them in order of impact.
"The goal of an audit is not to find fault. It is to find the gap between what your account is doing and what it could be doing."
If three or four of the signs above resonated — or if you genuinely could not answer the "where to check" steps — that is a strong signal that an independent review would be worth your time.
Find out which of these are happening in your account.
A human expert reviews every campaign, setting, and conversion — then delivers a clear PDF report within 2 business days. No retainer. No upsell. Just honest findings.
Get Your Audit — USD 75 per campaign →Not sure where to start? Email us first and we will tell you honestly whether an audit makes sense.