The Google Ads session at BrightonSEO on Friday afternoon was one of the most practically useful of the whole conference — not because it covered anything exotic, but because it addressed two foundational problems that affect almost every account I audit, presented with data clear enough to make the case for fixing them.
The session featured two presentations back to back: Dez Calton on negative keyword management, and Lars Mars from the Netherlands on advanced conversion tracking. Together they made a compelling argument: you can have a perfectly structured campaign with excellent ad copy and still be wasting significant budget and optimising toward the wrong outcomes, simply because of gaps in how you’re managing search terms and measuring results.
Problem One: 10–30% of Your Budget Is Probably Wasted
Dez opened by emphasising that inefficiency in PPC is not usually the result of bad management or fraud. It’s the result of Google matching your ads to search terms you would not intentionally bid on — research queries, competitor-brand queries, adjacent but irrelevant categories, and terms that attract browsers rather than buyers.
Even well-managed accounts typically waste between 10 and 30% of ad spend on irrelevant or low-intent search terms. In an account with a £10,000 monthly budget, that’s £1,000 to £3,000 per month failing to reach buyers who are ready to act. For a business spending £50,000 monthly, it’s £5,000 to £15,000.
The cause is structural. Google’s match types have been progressively loosening. Broad match now captures a much wider range of queries than it used to. And critically — the search terms report no longer shows you everything. A significant portion of the queries triggering your ads are simply not visible. You cannot manage what you cannot see.
Dez shared data from a study of £10 million in ad spend, primarily in financial services. Non-visible search terms — those Google matches to but hides from advertisers — had significantly worse performance across every metric: higher cost per click, lower click-through rates, lower conversion rates, and cost per conversion up to 80% higher than for visible search terms. The same budget, dramatically worse outcomes, and most advertisers have no idea it’s happening.
The Solution: Proactive, Not Reactive
The shift Dez advocates is from reactive to proactive negative keyword management. The reactive approach — adding negative keywords when you spot bad search terms in your report — means the damage is already done. Money is already spent on irrelevant clicks before you act.
The proactive approach uses Google’s Keyword Planner with your page URL to identify what terms Google would associate with your content before your campaign goes live. You filter out everything that doesn’t match your actual target audience. You build comprehensive negative keyword lists at the account, campaign, or ad group level before budget is spent, not after.
His practical tips:
- Never discard irrelevant keywords from previous campaigns — they become your starting negative list for future ones
- Maintain an account-level negative keyword list for terms that will never be relevant regardless of campaign
- For agencies managing multiple accounts, consider shared negative keyword lists at MCC level
- Check the Notifications tab in Google Ads for negative keyword conflicts — these are often missed
- Build a proactive negative keyword review into your standard monthly management process, not just on launch
🔑 For Irish exporters running Google Ads in UK or EU markets
The negative keyword challenge is compounded by geography. Broad match in the UK can surface ads for regional slang, competitor brand names, and adjacent categories that are perfectly valid queries — just not for your product. A dedicated negative keyword list per target market is worth building from the start of every campaign.
Problem Two: You're Probably Optimising Toward the Wrong Goal
Lars Mars’s presentation on conversion tracking made an equally uncomfortable point: even when campaigns are running efficiently, many businesses are optimising Google’s algorithms toward metrics that don’t reflect actual business value.
He began by asking a question that sounds obvious but is rarely answered clearly: what is your actual measurement goal? Not form submissions. Not calls. Actual business outcomes — profit, new customers, long-term value. He walked through the basics of conversion tracking setup before moving into the territory that matters most for B2B businesses.
Enhanced Conversions and Server-Side Tracking
Enhanced conversions improve measurement accuracy — particularly for video and Demand Gen campaigns. But Lars’s key recommendation was on server-side tracking: when you implement a new server-side conversion action, set it as a secondary conversion initially. Verify its accuracy before making it primary for campaign optimisation. This is a small process change that prevents the algorithm from optimising toward inaccurate data during the validation period.
Offline Conversion Tracking
For B2B businesses, this is the most significant opportunity Lars covered. Offline conversion tracking allows you to import data from your CRM into Google Ads — so that when a lead submitted through your website eventually becomes a signed contract, that outcome is fed back into the algorithm. You are no longer optimising for form fills. You are optimising for the quality of leads that actually convert to revenue.
For most B2B companies I work with — where the sales cycle is weeks or months, not hours — the disconnect between ‘Google Ads says this campaign generated 47 leads’ and ‘sales says five of them were any good’ is a real and expensive problem. Offline conversion imports close that gap.
Profit on Ad Spend (POAS) Over ROAS
Lars’s final point was on optimisation targets. ROAS — Return on Ad Spend — is still the dominant metric in most Google Ads accounts. But ROAS ignores costs and margins. A campaign delivering 400% ROAS on a product with a 15% margin is losing money. Lars’s recommendation is to track profit as a conversion goal, with new profit-based conversion actions tested as secondary before being used for campaign optimisation.
POAS — Profit on Ad Spend — gives you and the algorithm a target that aligns with what your business actually needs to grow.
Conclusion
If you're running Google Ads and not confident your budget is working as hard as it should, get in touch.
Every Google Ads account managed at Agile Digital Strategy includes proactive negative keyword reviews, conversion tracking audits, and where appropriate, offline conversion import setup.
