5 Of The Biggest Website Mistakes You Can Make When Running Google Ads

When it comes to running Google Ads, most business owners and marketers spend a significant amount of time focused on the campaigns themselves. The keywords, the bidding strategies, the ad copy, the targeting. All of that matters enormously, of course, but there is one area that often gets overlooked entirely, and that is the website itself. You can have the most well-crafted Google Ads campaign in the world, but if the website it sends traffic to is letting you down, you are essentially pouring money into a bucket with a hole in it. The clicks cost you just the same whether they convert or not, and that is a painful reality that far too many advertisers discover only after spending far more than they should have.

Understanding the connection between your Google Ads performance and your website experience is fundamental to online marketing success. This guide covers five of the biggest website mistakes that can seriously damage your results, your return on investment, and ultimately your confidence in paid search as a channel.

Not Using a Dedicated Landing Page

One of the most common and costly mistakes businesses make when running Google Ads is sending all of their paid traffic directly to their homepage. It seems logical on the surface. The homepage is the front door of the website, so why not send people there? The problem is that your homepage is designed to tell a broad story about your entire business. It has navigation menus, multiple messages, links to various services, and a whole host of distractions that pull visitors in different directions before they have even had a chance to engage with the specific thing they searched for.

When someone clicks on an ad for a specific product or service, they arrive with a very clear intent in mind. If the page they land on does not immediately reflect that intent, they will leave. It really is as straightforward as that. A dedicated landing page, built specifically around the message of your ad and the intent of the user, removes friction, maintains focus, and gives the visitor every reason to take the next step.

Think about relevance as a golden thread running from the search term, through the ad, and into the page itself. When that thread is unbroken, conversion rates improve and your Quality Score within Google Ads benefits as well, which can reduce your cost per click over time.

Quick fix: Build specific landing pages for each ad group or campaign, making sure the headline, imagery, and copy all align directly with the ad that brought the visitor there. Keep the page focused on a single goal and remove unnecessary navigation links that might pull people away before they convert.

Not Implementing Conversion Tracking

It is genuinely surprising how many businesses run Google Ads without any proper conversion tracking in place. Without tracking, you have absolutely no idea which keywords are driving sales, which ads are generating leads, or where your budget is actually performing. You are essentially driving with your eyes closed and hoping for the best.

Proper conversion tracking is the foundation of any successful online marketing strategy. Whether your goal is a purchase, a form submission, a phone call, or even a specific page visit that signals genuine interest, tracking those actions gives you the data you need to make smart decisions. Without it, optimising your campaigns becomes guesswork, and guesswork rarely leads to profitable outcomes.

Google Ads provides robust tools for setting up conversion tracking, and when combined with Google Analytics 4, you gain an even deeper understanding of how users behave on your website after clicking your ads. Knowing that a particular keyword consistently drives enquiries, for example, allows you to invest more confidently in that area. Knowing that another keyword burns through budget without a single meaningful action tells you exactly where to make cuts.

Quick fix: Set up conversion tracking before your campaigns go live, not after. Identify the actions that genuinely matter to your business, configure them correctly within Google Ads or via Google Tag Manager, and verify that they are firing as expected. Do not optimise for vanity metrics. Focus on actions that have real commercial value.

Ignoring Page Speed

Page speed is one of those things that people know they should care about but often push to the bottom of the priority list. When you are running Google Ads and paying for every single click, page speed becomes a critical factor that you simply cannot afford to ignore. If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, a large proportion of your visitors will have already left before they have seen a single word of your content.

This is not just about user experience, although that matters enormously. Page speed also plays a role in your Google Ads Quality Score, which directly influences how much you pay per click and how prominently your ads are shown. A slow website is costing you in more ways than one. You are losing visitors who click and then bounce, and you may also be paying more for your clicks as a result of a lower Quality Score.

There are a number of common culprits behind slow page speeds, including uncompressed images, bloated code, too many third-party scripts loading on the page, and poor hosting infrastructure. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help you identify exactly where the issues lie and what needs to be addressed as a priority.

Quick fix: Run your landing pages through Google PageSpeed Insights and address the highest priority recommendations first. Compress and optimise all images, reduce unnecessary scripts, and consider whether your hosting package is genuinely fit for purpose. A faster page keeps visitors engaged and makes every penny of your ad spend work harder.

Failing to Optimise for All Devices

A huge proportion of online searches now happen on mobile devices, and yet many websites still deliver a frustrating experience to anyone not sitting at a desktop computer. If your landing pages are difficult to navigate on a smartphone, if buttons are too small to tap accurately, if text requires pinching and zooming to read, or if forms are clunky and hard to complete on a touchscreen, you are losing conversions from a significant portion of your audience.

When you are investing in Google Ads to drive traffic to your website, you need to think about every type of visitor who might arrive. Someone searching for your service on their lunch break using a mobile phone has just as much intent as someone browsing on a laptop at home. The experience you deliver to them needs to be just as smooth, just as clear, and just as easy to act upon.

Responsive design is no longer optional. It is an expectation. Google itself uses mobile-first indexing, and the overall quality of the mobile experience on your landing pages will influence your campaign performance whether you are paying close attention to it or not. Testing your pages across a range of devices and screen sizes should be a routine part of your CRO process, not something you do once at launch and then forget about.

Quick fix: Test every landing page on multiple devices before directing paid traffic to it. Pay particular attention to load times on mobile connections, the size and accessibility of buttons and form fields, and the overall readability of your content. If the mobile experience falls short, fix it before you spend another penny on clicks.

Ignoring Clear Calls to Action

Your landing page can load instantly, look beautiful on every device, and be perfectly aligned with your ad copy, but if a visitor cannot immediately understand what you want them to do next, they will do nothing. A clear and compelling call to action is the difference between a page that converts and one that simply generates traffic statistics with no commercial outcome.

Many websites make the mistake of either having no obvious call to action at all, or having so many competing options that the visitor becomes confused and disengaged. Both extremes are damaging. A page that asks visitors to browse the shop, read the blog, follow on social media, sign up for a newsletter, and request a quote all at once is not guiding anyone towards a specific outcome. It is creating noise.

Good CRO practice tells us that each page should have a primary goal, and the call to action should reflect that goal clearly and prominently. The language of your CTA matters too. Generic phrases like "click here" or "submit" are weak. More purposeful alternatives that reflect the value the visitor is about to receive tend to perform considerably better. Think about what the visitor gets when they take action, and let that shape the words you use.

Quick fix: Review every landing page you are sending paid traffic to and identify the single most important action you want visitors to take. Make sure that action is clearly signposted above the fold, repeated where appropriate further down the page, and written in language that emphasises value rather than effort.

Bringing It All Together

Running Google Ads successfully is about far more than just getting the campaigns right. The website experience you deliver once someone clicks on your ad is just as important as the targeting and copy that brought them there in the first place. Not using dedicated landing pages, neglecting conversion tracking, ignoring page speed, failing to optimise for mobile users, and lacking clear calls to action are five mistakes that can quietly undermine even the most carefully built campaigns.

The good news is that each of these issues is entirely fixable. Addressing them does not require rebuilding your entire website from scratch. It requires taking a structured, honest look at what your visitors experience when they arrive, and making the improvements that give them every reason to take the next step. Better landing pages, proper tracking, faster load times, a seamless mobile experience, and compelling calls to action are the foundations of strong online sales performance. Get these right, and your Google Ads investment will work considerably harder for your business.