Agency insights
Thoughts and lessons on client selection, burnout, pricing, and modernising legacy accounts, from someone who's run a Google Ads for years.
Google showed your ads to the wrong people today.
Published April 2021. Last updated July 2026.
Google showed your some of your adverts to the wrong people today. You (or someone you hire) must deal with this or your ads are going to start costing more and generating fewer leads.
The wrong people seeing your ad is a problem whether they click your ad or not:
- If they click the ad you've wasted money. On a tight budget that could mean missing out on a future customer.
- If they don't click on your ad it's still a problem. Google uses the click through rate (how often your ads are clicked) as part of their formula for working out how good your ads are. Good ads get shown more and charged less per click. It's a virtuous circle. Ads that don't get clicked as often start start circling the drain.
Google isn't being malicious when they show your ads to the wrong people.
It happens because people don't always use the same words to search for what you sell. 15% of the trillion search phrases that people type into Google every year have never been seen before.
Put another way, 1 in 7 searches typed into Google has never been typed in before.
Google shows your ads for some of those new searches. Most of the time they get it right. Sometimes they don't so they provide a way for you to stop your ads showing in response to some searches.
I've written about this before but I still see this problem in almost every AdWords account I consult on. I got this from a South African client last time I wrote about this.
"We paid Google a fortune for rubbish clicks … people wanting gate opening times, camping and all sorts of nonsense costing us R12 or so per click. It looks like we have wasted R200k!"
It's a silent creeping problem. It took him about a year to waste that money.
Your AdWords campaign doesn't stop dead and it doesn't blow the budget right away. It's a bit like the rust under the carpet of my first car. I didn't even know it was there till my girlfriend put her foot through the floor like Mrs Flintstone.
Dealing with this once a month is right for the kinds of campaigns I manage. You might need to do it more often or get away with doing it less frequently.
I find Google's interface is uncomfortable for this workflow so I built a tool to streamline the work. It doesn't demand a PhD in AdWords and takes only a few minutes per campaign if done regularly.
You're welcome to use the tool for your campaigns.
Most Google Ads Problems Aren't Google Ads Problems
If my writing resonates with you, I'd like to give you a copy of my book, Profitable Google Ads. The book was written for business owners, but many PPC professionals have found it valuable too.
Before you download it, what describes you best?
Related articles
Every Google Ads lead leaves a trail of evidence
Why a Google Ads account audit isn't enough
Why I'm rethinking how I audit Google Ads accounts
Testing Google Ads for an RV Campground
Mining the search terms report for negative keywords is a waste of time
What’s the right bidding strategy for a brand new Google Ads account?
Topics you'll find on this site
Conversion tracking
Understand what happens after someone clicks your advert. Subjects include offline conversions, CRM integration, attribution, auditability and marketing instrumentation.
Essays and thinking
Articles about marketing, engineering, AI and problem solving that don't fit neatly into the other topics. These are some of the ideas and experiences that have shaped how I think.
Google Ads for lead generation
Learn how to use Google Ads to generate profitable leads. Subjects include campaign strategy, bidding, targeting, optimisation and the challenges of running lead generation campaigns.
Landing pages
Things I've learned about high-converting landing pages. Subjects include copywriting, page structure, forms, trust, conversion rate optimisation and user experience.
Lead quality
Understand why some leads become customers while others don't. Subjects include diagnosing poor leads, qualification, filtering junk leads and improving the feedback you send to Google Ads.
Sales Process
What happens after a lead has been generated determines if Google Ads is profitable. Subjects include first contact, follow-up, quoting, lead nurturing and turning more enquiries into customers.