Most businesses set up their Google Ads the same way they'd use a crockpot. Toss in a budget, launch a few campaigns, and check back later expecting leads to be ready.

Except unlike a crockpot, the result isn't some delicious meal, it's usually a mess of results and doesn't taste nearly as good. 

Ad accounts drift and budgets quietly bleed out. Broad match keywords start pulling in searches that have nothing to do with your business. Conversion tracking stops firing and nobody notices. Google's automated recommendations get clicked through without a second thought. On paper, everything looks fine, but meanwhile your sales team is scratching their heads wondering why they were served a sloppy mess of leads.

SearchLab's PPC Team Lead Susan Yen dug into all of this during a recent webinar, covering keyword match types, conversion tracking, and how Google's push toward automation is reshaping paid search. If you're spending real money on PPC, it's worth a watch.

The Biggest “Set It and Forget It” Mistake in Google Ads

Auto-apply recommendations is like just using any ingredients in the crockpot regardless of the dish you are trying to make.

Google enables many of these automatically unless someone actively goes in and changes the settings. This is very important because based on your goals you may want some of these, or none these turned on.

Google, Microsoft, Meta, any ad platform really, is built to maximize activity and spend, it is not built to protect your budget. 

"Letting anyone take your money and do whatever they want with it is not a good strategy."

- Susan Yen

Automation can be great, but it still needs direction, and guardrails to ensure it is performing in your company's best interest. 

Broad Match Can Drain Your Budget Fast.

When broad match is left unchecked, Google starts connecting your ads to searches that are only loosely related to what you actually offer. A dealership trying to sell vehicles might start showing up for oil change searches.

A Honda dealer could end up appearing for Mercedes searches. Service campaigns bleed into sales campaigns. The crockpot is just tossing in whatever ingredients are nearby regardless of what you're making, and you're paying for every bite whether anyone eats it or not.

Why Search Term Reports Matter More Than Most Businesses Realize

If there was one recurring theme throughout the webinar, it was this: check your search term reports, often. 

Search term reports show the actual queries people typed before clicking your ad. That visibility matters because it tells you whether the right people are finding you or whether you're burning budget on the wrong audience entirely. Irrelevant searches, wasted spend, match type problems, poor lead quality patterns, and missed keyword opportunities all show up here if you know what to look for.

A report full of clicks means nothing if the wrong people keep showing up at the door.

Negative Keywords Are Your Budget’s Best Friend

Most advertisers spend a lot of time adding keywords. Far fewer put the same energy into building out negative keyword lists, which is just as important. 

Negative keywords are how you tell Google what you don't want to show up for. Without them, broad match campaigns can spiral fast.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

• "Oil change" excluded from sales campaigns
• Competitor brands excluded where they aren't relevant
• Service-related searches separated from inventory searches

That separation between campaign goals is what protects your budget efficiency and keeps lead quality where it needs to be.

Automated Bidding Still Needs Human Oversight

Google pushes automated bidding hard across nearly every campaign type. Sometimes it works well, other times not so much. The difference usually comes down to whether your conversion tracking is actually accurate.

When an account feeds bad data into automated bidding, the platform optimizes toward the wrong outcomes.

If page views are accidentally counted as conversions, Google starts aggressively chasing users who simply browse pages rather than ones who actually become leads. This creates a disconnect.

I won't add another crockpot reference here, but you get the idea. 

Before trusting automated bidding, businesses need to make sure the foundation is solid:

• Conversion tracking is accurate
• Phone calls are tracked correctly
• Duplicate conversions are filtered out
• Page views are not inflating lead counts
• Thank you pages are configured properly

Inputs need to be clear, and intentional to help the automation work as efficiently as possible with your budget. 

Your Ad Copy Gets Stale Faster Than You Think

Responsive Search Ads made ad creation easier, but easier may not always mean better.

One of the biggest mistakes advertisers make is launching ads that perform well out of the gate and then never touching them again.

Over time ad fatigue sets in. Click-through rates start slipping, conversion rates drop, and ads that once pulled solid numbers quietly start underperforming even while impressions stay high.

Businesses need to regularly refresh their headlines, descriptions, offers, and messaging. Ads go stale and the numbers will eventually tell you so whether you're paying attention or not. 

There's also a bigger issue creeping in. AI-assisted ad copy has made production faster, but when everyone leans entirely on automation, the ads start sounding identical.  

Your ads need to communicate what actually makes your business different. Why someone should trust you over the competition. What your real offers are. What your genuine selling points are. The businesses that stand out are the ones that still sound like a real person wrote the ad with a specific customer in mind, like using cooking analogies to describe PPC ads. 

The Full Funnel Still Matters

Success is about alignment across the entire customer journey.

Think about what that actually looks like in sequence. Someone searches a keyword, sees an ad, clicks through to a landing page, moves through a conversion process, and that action gets tracked on the backend. If any single one of those pieces breaks down, performance suffers.

This gets messier when businesses are running SEO and PPC at the same time. Landing pages get updated, messaging shifts, offers change, and if the two teams aren't looped in with each other, the campaigns start pulling in different directions before anyone realizes what happened.

Google Recommendations Are Suggestions, Not Instructions

Do not blindly accept Google's recommendations, or anyone's recommendations for that matter. 

Some of them are genuinely useful. Others will quietly expand your targeting, inflate your spend, or shift your bidding strategy in ways that have nothing to do with what you're actually trying to accomplish. 

The reason is simply your goals and Google's goals are different. That does not mean Google is not useful or helpful, it just means your both looking to maximize profit, however when Google does this they do not care about your profit. 

Every recommendation that comes through should be measured against your actual business goals before anyone clicks accept. 

Google Marketing Live Signals a More Automated Future

Google is moving aggressively toward AI-driven advertising across the board, with updates spanning AI-generated ad assets, expanded Gemini integrations, new video creation tools, AI-powered search experiences, more shopping functionality inside YouTube, and AI summaries showing up directly in search results.

Some of these will genuinely become useful over time. Businesses shouldn't feel pressure to chase every new feature the moment Google rolls it out. New doesn't automatically mean effective, and plugging untested automation into a live account without asking the right questions first is how things can go sideways quickly.

What Businesses Should Check Inside Their Ad Account Today

Before ending the webinar, Susan shared a simple checklist businesses should review immediately.

Start with your search term report

Make sure you are showing up for searches that actually align with your business goals.

Review your conversion tracking

Verify that:

• Leads are counted correctly
• Duplicate conversions are not inflating numbers
• Page views are not being treated as conversions
• Calls and forms are configured properly

Audit auto-apply settings

Confirm Google is not making automatic changes behind the scenes.

Review recommendations carefully

Treat recommendations as suggestions, not mandatory actions.

Evaluate your ad copy

If ads have not been refreshed in months, there is a good chance performance is slipping.

Key Takeaways

• Broad match without guardrails burns budget fast
• Search term reports should be reviewed at least every two weeks
• Negative keywords are essential for protecting lead quality
• Automation is only as good as your conversion tracking
• High lead volume does not equal high-quality leads
• Ad fatigue sets in faster than most businesses expect
• Google's recommendations should always be reviewed before accepting
• PPC performance depends on alignment across the full funnel
• AI tools can help, but human oversight still matters

Final Thoughts

Google Ads can absolutely drive meaningful growth, but successful campaigns don't run themselves. They require strategy, monitoring, cleanup, testing, and ongoing optimization. The businesses that win aren't always the ones spending the most, they're the ones paying the closest attention. If you want clarity on what's actually helping or hurting your performance, book a strategy call with SearchLab and find out where your budget could be working harder.