The 4 Google Ads Lies Costing You a Fortune

You’re spending money on Google Ads, but you have a nagging feeling it’s not working. You see the clicks, you see the invoice, but you don’t see the clients. You’re right to be suspicious.

Google Ads is a powerful tool, but its default settings are designed to make Google money, not you. They bank on you being too busy to dig into the details. Here’s the truth about why you’re probably spending a fortune on clicks that will never turn into business.

1. You’re paying for kids to click ads in games.

This is the one Google really doesn’t want you to know about. Mobile ads are a huge part of their revenue, and a shocking amount of that comes from junk clicks. Anyone who’s played a mobile game knows they make it hard to avoid tapping the ads. It’s intentional. And it’s common for parents to hand their phone to a child who will tap on anything that moves.

Your ads aren’t being seen by your target clients. They’re being seen by toddlers playing cartoon games.

You can find this information if you know where to look. Go to Campaigns > Insights and reports > When and where ads showed > Where ads showed. You’ll see a report of the sites and apps where your ads appeared. I’m betting it won’t be pretty. It’ll probably look something like this.

Those are the top placements for an account I recently took over. I’m guessing your ideal clients aren’t spending their time on “coloring book for kids” or “cat games.”

How to fix it: You have to manually exclude these placements. Exclude the game sites that show up most in your results. Add exclusions for “G-rated content” and “Content suitable for families.” Create topic exclusions for games and children’s content. In your mobile app settings, exclude categories like “Games” and “Kids & Family.” You should also use demographic targeting to exclude age groups under 18 and lower your bids for mobile and tablet placements to minimize this junk traffic.

2. Your ads aren’t targeting the location you think they are.

When you create a new campaign, the location targeting looks simple. You enter a state or a city, and you assume that’s who will see your ads. But Google pulls a nasty trick to get you to spend more money.

Hidden under “Location options” is a critical setting that changes everything.

By default, Google includes not just people in your target region, but anyone who has shown interest in it.

So when you’re trying to serve ads to homeowners in Texas, you’re also paying for clicks from Dallas Cowboys fans in Florida, SXSW attendees from two years ago, and grill masters in Maine looking up BBQ techniques. They do this because it inflates their potential audience and drains your budget on irrelevant traffic.

Here’s a real world example. I was targeting the United States and forgot to switch this setting for just one day. Here’s where my ads actually showed up.

I had to create a custom report to even find this. They make the information difficult to access on purpose.

How to fix it: Always open the hidden location options and select “Presence” instead of the default “Presence or interest,” unless you have a specific strategic reason to target both.

3. Google shows your ads for irrelevant search phrases.

Unless you change it, Google defaults your search campaigns to “broad match” keywords.

This means instead of just using the keywords you provide, it “helpfully” expands your list to anything it thinks might be related. If you sell baseball caps, broad match will also show your ads to people searching for cowboy hats, fedoras, and sombreros. None of those are your customers, but you’ll pay for their clicks.

They love this feature so much that even when you turn it off, they use fuzzy logic to match against your keywords. I was running my own ads targeting searches for “marketing agencies in Arizona,” with broad match turned off. Here are the top search phrases that I paid for clicks on.

• “marketing content automation mexico”

• “ecommerce business management software bahamas”

• “intelligent marketing automation mexico”

• “social media marketing training in mexico”

None of those clicks were potential customers for me, but I paid for them anyway. Thanks, Google.

How to fix it: Turn broad match keywords off. It’s almost certainly not the right fit for your business.

4. Most of their “recommendations” are just ways to make them more money.

When you log into Google Ads, you’ll see urgent sounding recommendations with a handy “Apply” button that will make sweeping changes to your account.

Unaware business owners often apply these recommendations reflexively. They think they’re optimizing their campaigns, but they’re actually destroying them. Almost all of Google’s recommendations are about expanding your audience as widely as possible so they can make more money. They’ll push you to add more keywords, switch to broad matching, and add more regions. It’s all about their bottom line, not yours.

You’ll also get calls from account managers offering “important” advice. It’s the same story. They want you to let Google make more money off you.

How to fix it: Never hit the “Apply” button without carefully reading exactly what it will do. If you don’t understand the change, dismiss the recommendation. Don’t hesitate to block calls from Google. You won’t miss anything important.

What’s Really Happening

The worst part about Google Ads is that nobody is incentivized to tell you the truth. Google intentionally hides this bad news in their interface. Most digital agencies won’t fix this stuff either because all those junk impressions and clicks make their campaign reports look better. It creates the illusion of success.

I’ve taken over campaigns from large, respected agencies and found every single one of these issues. In one case, I cut the customer acquisition cost to a fraction of what it was before just by fixing these basic mistakes.

The only way to avoid this is to have a trusted expert on your side. You need someone who is focused on optimizing your ad spend, not just maximizing it. A good Fractional CMO, for example, acts as an insider. Your budget is their budget to protect. It’s possible to win with Google Ads, but only if you have someone on your team who knows what they’re doing and is accountable for running a genuinely optimized campaign.