3 mistakes I see in 90% of inherited Google Ads accounts
Over the years, I’ve inherited quite a few Google Ads accounts, some from agencies, some from in-house teams, and occasionally from business owners who were trying to manage things themselves.
And to be honest, most of them are not “bad” accounts.
They’re usually working.
They’re generating some conversions.
They have history and data.
But when you look a little closer, you start to see patterns.
Not dramatic mistakes.
Just small structural issues that slowly hold performance back, especially when the business tries to scale.
There are three things I see over and over again.
1. Tracking that doesn’t reflect real business outcomes
This is usually the first thing I check, because everything else depends on it.
Sometimes conversions are duplicated.
Sometimes they fire too early.
Sometimes the account is optimising toward actions that don’t actually matter to the business.
I’ve seen accounts where the system was bidding aggressively for newsletter signups while the business cared about purchases.
I’ve also seen conversion values set to $0 or $1 simply because nobody revisited the setup after launch.
None of this is intentional, it just happens over time.
But when the signals are wrong, the system learns the wrong behaviour.
And once that happens, performance becomes inconsistent, and scaling becomes risky.
2. Campaign structures that split budgets too thin
This one is incredibly common, especially in accounts that have grown organically over the years.
New campaigns get added for new products, new locations, new ideas, but nothing ever gets consolidated.
Eventually you end up with dozens of campaigns competing for the same traffic.
Recently I worked on an account that had 44 campaigns running on roughly a $5,600 monthly budget.
On paper, everything looked active.
In reality, each campaign was receiving about $4 per day.
That’s simply not enough data for the system to learn properly.
Budgets get diluted.
Signals become noisy.
And performance becomes unpredictable.
It’s not a bidding problem, it’s a structure problem.
3. Automation running without a solid foundation
Automation is not the enemy.
In fact, most of the time it works extremely well.
But automation depends on the environment you give it.
If tracking is unreliable and the structure is fragmented, the system will still optimise, it just optimises toward the wrong things.
That’s when people start changing bidding strategies every few weeks, thinking the platform is the issue.
Usually the platform is doing exactly what it was told to do.
One thing I’ve learned from inheriting accounts is this:
Most performance problems don’t start with ads.
They start with the system underneath them.
So when I take over a new account, I rarely begin by writing new ads or adjusting bids.
I start by looking at three things:
Signals
Structure
System
Once those are stable, optimisation becomes much simpler, and scaling becomes much safer.
