How to Get More From Google Ads: 10 Fixes in Priority Order

Most advice on getting more from Google Ads arrives as a flat list, as if every item were worth the same. They are not. The first three fixes below carry most of the improvement available in a typical Australian account, and the other seven share what is left.

Treat this as an audit you work from the top. Each item is short on purpose and links to a full guide where the site has one, so you can go deep on the fix you need and skip the ones you have already done.

The checklist, in priority order

1. Make conversion tracking real before anything else

Smart Bidding learns from whatever you tell it is valuable, as Google’s guide to conversion measurement makes clear, so counting page views or button clicks trains it toward the wrong people. Remove any action that fires without a real enquiry, set only the ones you care about as primary conversion actions (the ones used for bidding), and add enhanced conversions to improve the accuracy of what is left. The test: could you ring every one of last month’s conversions and have a sales conversation?

2. Cut the keyword list rather than extend it

Every keyword you add divides the same budget into smaller pieces, and a keyword on a few clicks a month can never tell you whether it works. The working range is 8 to 20 keywords per ad group. Pausing the keywords with meaningful spend and no conversions is often the fastest gain available. A rough ceiling: last month’s conversions divided by three is about how many keywords you can meaningfully manage.

3. Give every ad group a page built for its search

Sending all traffic to the homepage lowers your conversion rate and raises your cost per click together, because landing page quality is one of the factors behind your position and price. Build one page per thing you advertise. If no page matches a search you bid on, that is a website problem that ad testing will not cover.

4. Build the negative keyword list properly

Job seekers, students, DIY researchers, free-seekers and competitor names you cannot service all cost money without warning. Australian accounts have a specific trap: overseas places that share names with local ones (Perth in Scotland, Richmond in London, Newcastle in England). Keep a shared list at account level for the universal exclusions and add campaign-level negatives for each service. A mature account usually carries more negative keywords than active ones.

5. Consolidate campaigns instead of splitting them

Budget is set per campaign, so six campaigns sharing AUD 3,000 a month get about AUD 16 a day each, a handful of clicks at Australian prices. There are three good reasons to separate a campaign: independent budget control, different locations, or a different campaign type. Merging the rest back usually cuts impression share lost to budget straight away.

6. Read the search terms report every month

Google’s search terms report shows the searches that triggered your ads, as opposed to the keywords you bid on. Add the good terms as keywords and the bad ones as negatives, twenty minutes a month. The more broad match you run, the more this matters, because it is the only place you see what broad match has been buying.

7. Fix the quality component that is costing you money

Add the Expected CTR, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience columns, sort by cost, and work only the expensive keywords reading Below average. Ignore cheap keywords with poor scores and ignore the account average. The three components fail for different reasons, and how to read each one matters more than the score itself.

8. Write ads about the offer, not the business

A price, a timeframe, a guarantee or a suburb will usually beat an adjective, and the searcher’s own words in a headline beat your brand language. Ten different claims beat fifteen rewordings of one, which makes this commercial writing work rather than an account setting. What Ad Strength does and does not measure covers how far to trust the rating while you write.

9. Read what your competitors are already testing

Google’s advertiser verification program puts verified advertisers and their ads in the Ads Transparency Center, where anyone can read them. You will not see spend or keywords, but you will see the message, the offer and how long each ad has run. Where to look and what it reveals takes about a minute per competitor. Note what they have stopped running too, since a message that vanished after three months was probably tested and dropped.

10. Judge the account on cost per customer

Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and position on the page are diagnostics, not results. Work it backwards once (cost per click, divided by landing page conversion rate, divided by close rate) and compare the cost per customer you get with your margin per customer, not revenue. An account with a falling click-through rate and a falling cost per customer is improving, whatever the dashboard suggests.

If you run Shopping or Performance Max

The checklist is written for Search campaigns, where most Australian accounts spend most of their money. Two items change shape if your account is built differently.

Your feed replaces your keywords. Shopping campaigns have no keywords. Google reads your product data to decide which searches your products appear for, so titles, images, categories and price do the job that keywords and ad copy do in Search. If Shopping disappoints, a new bid strategy only changes how fast you lose money, and the work happens in your feed.

Audience signals are hints, not targeting. Performance Max accepts audience signals, and your own customer lists are the strongest ones you can supply. They point the system at a starting group rather than restricting it. They are also not the same as a lookalike audience, a feature that went away when Google stopped generating similar audiences from May 2023, though plenty of advice still assumes it exists.

Where to start this week

Open your conversion actions today and fix anything that is not a real enquiry, because every later item depends on that number. Fixes one to three are foundational and safe to work on together. From item four onward, change one thing at a time and give each change a few weeks before judging it, or you will never know which one worked. If you would rather hand the audit over, that is what our Google Ads management starts with.