The 5 lies Google Ads tells you — what I only saw as an ex-Googler
Google Ads is built so that you make the mistakes that make Google money. As a former Google consultant, here are the 5 most common traps — and how to walk around them.
Originally written in German — read it on visnakovs.de.
I worked at Google myself, and I saw how staff get trained and what the platform is optimised for. Spoiler: not your profit.
This isn’t conspiracy talk — it’s just the business model. Google makes almost all of its revenue from ads. The interface, the recommendations and the friendly phone calls are designed to make you spend more, not to make you earn more. Two different things.
Here are the five claims Google sells you over and over — and why you should pause at every one of them.
Lie 1: “Get your optimisation score to 100%”
The optimisation score looks like a school grade for your account. In reality it measures one thing: how obediently you implement Google’s suggestions.
And the suggestions? “Raise your budget.” “Add keywords.” “Switch to broad match.” “Turn on Performance Max.” Every one of them means more money to Google.
The optimisation score does not correlate with your profit. I’ve seen accounts at 65% running highly profitably — and 100% accounts burning money. Ignore the number. It’s Google’s wish list, not your P&L.
Lie 2: “Turn on auto-apply”
That’s like handing a stranger from sales the keys to your ad account. Auto-apply lets Google add keywords, change bids and flip settings on its own initiative, without asking.
Switch it off. You decide what your money is spent on. Full stop.
Lie 3: “Use broad match with Smart Bidding — the AI will find the customers”
The theory sounds fine: broad match casts a wide net, Smart Bidding fishes out the right people. The reality for most local businesses: without hundreds of conversions a month, the AI guesses more than it knows.
The result is clicks on “roofer apprenticeship”, “buy bricks” or “… do it yourself” — all out of your budget. Stay on phrase match and exact match until you have enough conversion data.
My search terms analysis tool (in German) shows you exactly how much budget broad match is costing you: drop the report in, see the burnt budget.
Lie 4: “Switch to maximise conversions — even without clean tracking”
If Google doesn’t know what a conversion is — because your tracking is missing, measures the wrong thing, or counts micro-actions like “page view” — then “maximise conversions” optimises towards something. Usually towards cheap clicks that do nothing.
Smart Bidding is only as smart as your data. Garbage in, garbage out. Set the tracking up properly, collect data, then automate.
Take 15 minutes to check whether your tracking measures cleanly at all: conversion tracking health check. Ready-made containers are in my GTM configurator (in German).
Lie 5: “Your personal Google strategy consultant is here to help, free of charge”
Those friendly calls from your “personal consultant”? Mostly salespeople in external call centres phoning on Google’s behalf — often from Poland, Portugal or Spain. They work from a script, and the script wants your budget raised and your automations switched on.
They don’t know your business, your margin or your profitable keywords. “Most advertisers use this” doesn’t mean “this is best for you”. (Source: I worked there myself.)
The permanently employed consultants sit in Dublin — but as a small advertiser you’ll rarely get one on the phone. When in doubt: thank them politely, hang up, decide for yourself.
The pattern behind all five
Google isn’t “evil”. But Google’s interest is not automatically your interest. Every one of these five recommendations reliably increases Google’s revenue. Whether it also increases your profit is, at best, Google’s second concern.
The answer isn’t “no Google Ads”. For local service businesses it’s one of the best channels there is, because people are actively searching. The answer is: keep control, optimise for profit instead of Google’s metrics, and know the default traps.
Find out in 2 minutes whether your account is walking into them
I’ve packed the most common of these settings traps into a free self-test — 11 yes/no questions, and afterwards you know where your account is working against you. It’s on my German site: Google Ads settings check (in German), 11 questions, two minutes, an honest result with a fix list.
And if you’d rather have someone look at it who knows the tricks from the inside, write to me at visnakovs@clickspire.de.