What to Fix First in a Broken Google Ads Account

Your Google Ads account is technically “running,” but leads have dried up, costs keep climbing, and every login feels like damage control. You are not alone. Retail advertisers, for example, accounted for 27% of total Google Ads spending in 2025, which means competition is fierce and mistakes get expensive fast. When performance tanks, the temptation is to start clicking around changing bids, pausing keywords, or rebuilding campaigns from scratch. That usually makes things worse.

Rescuing a broken Google Ads account is less about random tweaks and more about triage: fixing the right problems in the right order. Some issues are like slow leaks; others are like a severed artery. The key is to stop the bleeding first, then repair the system so it can actually grow again. The steps below follow the same order used by strong performance agencies and senior in-house marketers when they walk into a mess and need to turn it around.

Stop the Bleeding: Policy, Security, and Account Health

Before touching keywords, ads, or budgets, it pays to ask a more basic question: is the account actually healthy and compliant? A lot of “performance issues” turn out to be warning signs that Google is losing trust in the account, that billing is flaky, or that policy flags are suppressing visibility.

Google has become far more aggressive about cleaning up low-quality and scammy behavior on the platform. In 2024, Google blocked or removed 415 million ads and suspended over 5 million accounts for violating ads policies associated with scams according to its Ads Safety Report. Even if your business is legitimate, sloppy setups can make your ads look risky to automated systems.

Check alerts, policy violations, and verification

Start by going through every notification and alert in the account. Look for disapproved ads, limited performance due to policy, or warnings about “circumventing systems,” “misrepresentation,” or “payment risk.” These can quietly suppress impressions and conversions long before any actual suspension happens.

Make sure all required verifications are complete and accurate. That includes advertiser verification, business name and website verification, and any industry-specific requirements. If your ads or extensions mention sensitive topics (like financial services or health claims), ensure the website content, disclaimers, and business details line up cleanly with what the ads promise.

Confirm billing, access, and security

Next, review payment methods and billing settings. Failed payments, expiring cards, or mismatched billing details can cause campaigns to stop serving or throttle unpredictably. Even minor interruptions here can show up as “random performance drops” when the real issue is that ads simply were not eligible to run for part of the day or week.

Then check who has access to the account. Remove users who no longer work with you or your company, and ensure any agencies or contractors have the right level of access. Turn on two-factor authentication for all key users via their Google accounts. Suspicious login behavior or shared logins is the kind of signal that can trigger extra scrutiny on an account already under pressure.

Fix Your Measurement Before You Touch Bids or Budgets

If conversions are not tracked correctly, every optimization is a guess. Many broken accounts share a common pattern: lots of tinkering with bids, daily budgets, and new campaign types layered on top of analytics that either undercount, overcount, or track the wrong actions entirely.

Before trying to “improve performance,” it helps to define what performance actually means. For most lead-generation businesses, that is qualified form fills, booked consultations, or phone calls past a certain duration. For ecommerce, that is revenue and margin, not just add-to-cart events. The goal is a clean, minimalist set of conversion actions that reflect actual business value.

Audit your conversion actions

Open the conversion tracking settings and list every conversion action currently included in bidding. Remove fluff: page views, newsletter signups that never get used, or generic button clicks that do not correlate with revenue. If Google’s automated bidding strategies are optimizing toward weak or noisy signals, they will drive traffic that looks “cheap” but never turns into customers.

Check implementation details too. Verify that tags or events fire only once per actual conversion, that duplicate tracking codes are not installed on the same pages, and that cross-domain tracking (if you send people to a booking tool or payment processor) is configured correctly. A surprisingly common scenario is a campaign that looks great in Google Ads, while the CRM or ecommerce platform shows very little real impact.

Validate data quality with spot checks

Once the configuration looks sane, test it like a skeptical auditor. Submit a test lead or place a small test order and follow it through the system. Does it show up in Google Ads with the right conversion type and value? Does it appear in your backend tools? Do timestamps roughly match up?

If possible, compare a recent time period across platforms: Google Ads, analytics, CRM or ecommerce platform, and any call tracking. Exact one-to-one alignment is rare, but large gaps or contradictory trends signal that tracking is still unreliable. Until this is fixed, avoid major structural changes or new automated bidding strategies, because they will optimize toward broken data.

Get the Fundamentals Right: Audience, Keywords, and Structure

Once the account is healthy and conversions are measured correctly, the next priority is making sure ads are actually reaching the right people with the right intent. Many weak accounts suffer from “blurry targeting”: broad keywords, random match types, and campaign structures that mix together very different audiences.

Marketing strategist Sam Tomlinson points to “lack of research and audience understanding” as one of the most common issues holding back Google Ads performance in his breakdown of common account problems. If the account was built around guesswork or copied from a competitor, fixing the fundamentals here often unlocks the biggest single improvement.

Clarify who you really want to reach

Start outside the interface. Write down the actual types of people you want to reach, the problems they are trying to solve, and the words they use to describe those problems. A local home services company, for example, might care more about “emergency same-day repairs” searches than general “information” searches that will never turn into bookings.

Then, map core audiences and intents to specific campaigns. High-intent searchers looking to buy now belong in tightly themed search campaigns with focused keywords. Broader interest or awareness goals might be better served by YouTube or Display remarketing. Mixing all of this into a single jack-of-all-trades campaign usually leads to muddled data and wasted spend.

Clean up keyword match types and search terms

Keyword match types can quietly make or break an account. Over-reliance on broad match keywords tends to pull in a lot of irrelevant traffic because ads may appear for loosely related or even unrelated searches as experienced practitioners often warn. In a broken account, it is common to see a thin layer of exact or phrase match keywords sitting on top of large, uncontrolled broad match coverage.

Review search term reports for the last few weeks. Look for patterns: queries that consistently cost money without producing conversions, irrelevant industries or locations, or informational searches that do not match your offer. Add negative keywords to block poor matches, and consider tightening match types on your highest-spend themes so you only pay for queries that truly align with your services.

Simplify structure without losing clarity

Some accounts break because they are too complex: dozens of campaigns, hundreds of ad groups, and overlapping themes that confuse both humans and Google’s systems. Others fail because they are too simple: one catch-all campaign trying to do everything. The goal is a middle ground where each campaign has a clear purpose and each ad group focuses on a small cluster of closely related queries.

Group keywords by intent and language, not by internal categories or website navigation alone. If people search “same-day furnace repair” and “emergency heater repair” with the same intent, those queries probably belong together even if your site lists them on different pages. Clean, intent-based structure makes it much easier to write specific ad copy, route traffic to the right landing pages, and interpret performance data.

Fix Your Ads and Landing Pages So They Actually Persuade

Even perfect targeting cannot save weak messaging or bad user experience. A lot of broken accounts are not suffering from a traffic problem so much as a persuasion problem. People click, but they do not understand the offer, do not trust the business, or find the landing page too confusing or frustrating.

The good news is that ad and landing page improvements often create fast, tangible lifts without having to increase budget. When someone searches with clear intent and sees a focused ad that speaks their language and sends them to a page that delivers exactly what was promised, conversion rates can shift dramatically.

Align intent, promise, and page

For each high-spend keyword group, compare the search terms, ad headlines, and landing page above the fold. If a searcher types in “same-day AC repair,” sees an ad about “Affordable HVAC Tune-Ups,” and lands on a generic homepage with a dozen unrelated services, performance will suffer even if the keyword itself is relevant.

Rewrite ads so each one mirrors the language and urgency of its target queries as closely as possible. Highlight one primary benefit and one clear differentiator: speed, specialization, guarantees, or social proof. Then ensure the landing page headline, subhead, and primary call-to-action continue that same message without forcing visitors to hunt for what they came to do.

Remove friction and build trust

Next, scan landing pages for friction points. Slow loading times, intrusive pop-ups, complex forms, and buried contact details all chip away at conversion rates. Trust elements-like reviews, case studies, clear pricing ranges, and photos or videos that look real instead of generic-can make a big difference, especially in categories where customers feel nervous about being scammed or overcharged.

Accessibility is a crucial part of this equation too. A 2024 study of ad-driven web applications found that 67% of websites experienced increased accessibility violations due to ads, with especially common issues around “Focus Visible” and “On Input” interactions according to researchers. Broken keyboard navigation, unreadable contrast, or elements that shift unpredictably can quietly drive away visitors who would otherwise convert. Fixing these issues helps both users and performance.

Test high-impact changes before redesigning everything

There is rarely a need to rebuild the entire site to fix a broken Google Ads account. Start with the pages that receive the most paid traffic, and test the simplest high-impact elements first: headlines, form length, the main call-to-action, and above-the-fold layout. These changes are faster to implement and easier to measure than a full redesign.

Run experiments one variable at a time where possible. If you change five things at once, it is hard to know what drove any improvement (or decline). Over a few iterations, small, focused tests often turn underperforming landing pages into dependable converters without needing huge design projects.

Make Budgets, Bids, and Automation Work for You

Only after fixing account health, measurement, targeting, and landing pages does it make sense to optimize budgets and bidding in a serious way. Changing bids on top of broken fundamentals is like tuning the engine of a car with flat tires and no fuel gauge-you might get more noise, but you will not get a smoother ride.

At this stage, the goal is to redirect spend from low-intent, low-converting areas into campaigns and keywords that actually generate profit. Automation can be a powerful ally here, but it works best when fed with clean, reliable data and clear goals.

Match bidding strategies to data and goals

If conversion tracking is solid and there are enough conversions in a given campaign, automated bidding strategies can help the system find promising auctions you might never think to target manually. For lower-volume campaigns or new experiments, more conservative manual or enhanced cost-per-click bidding sometimes provides better control while data accumulates.

Either way, choose one primary objective per campaign-leads, sales, or revenue-and ensure the bidding strategy reflects that. Avoid constantly switching strategies or targets in response to short-term fluctuations. Instead, evaluate performance over meaningful time windows so decisions are based on statistically useful data rather than day-to-day noise.

When to Bring in Help (and What We Fix First at North Country Consulting)

Some accounts can be rescued with a focused internal effort over a few weeks. Others are tangled enough-especially after years of ad hoc changes or multiple agencies-that outside help saves a lot of time and wasted spend. Knowing when to escalate is itself a sign of good management, not failure.

One clear trigger is policy or trust-related trouble. In 2024, Google suspended over 700,000 advertiser accounts promoting scam ads, which led to a 90% drop in such scam reports according to its Ads Safety Report. Even legitimate businesses can get swept up in increasingly strict automated checks. If you are seeing repeated disapprovals, unexplained performance throttling, or warnings you do not fully understand, getting expert eyes on the account quickly can prevent much bigger problems.

How we triage a broken account at North Country Consulting

At North Country Consulting, we treat every broken Google Ads account like an emergency room visit. First, we stabilize the patient: check for policy and billing issues, confirm tracking is working, and make sure no campaigns are quietly hemorrhaging budget on irrelevant or low-intent traffic. If something is critically wrong, we pause or reconfigure it immediately to protect your spend.

Once the bleeding is under control, we rebuild the backbone of the account. We dig into your audience and business model, tighten keyword and match type strategy, and restructure campaigns so each one has a clear job. Then we align ad messaging and landing pages to real customer intent, focusing on the pages that matter most to your bottom line. Only after this foundation is in place do we lean into automation and more advanced tactics.

Why choose us as your Google Ads partner

There are plenty of agencies that will happily take over your Google Ads account and start tweaking settings. We do not stop at surface-level changes. We pair deep account diagnostics with business-level thinking: how your sales process works, which leads actually turn into customers, and what makes your offer stand out in a crowded marketplace.

If your account feels stuck, chaotic, or outright broken, the fastest path back to profitable results is a clear, prioritized plan and a team that has been through this cleanup process many times before. That is exactly what we bring at North Country Consulting, and it is why clients rely on us as their go-to partner for fixing and then scaling Google Ads in a way that actually matches their real-world goals.

Ready to turn your Google Ads account from a source of stress into a growth engine for your business? At North Country Consulting, our deep roots in Google Ads and proven track record with major startups like Stripe and Apollo.io position us uniquely to elevate your digital marketing and revenue operations. Don't let a broken Google Ads account hold you back. Book a free consultation with us today and start your journey towards a highly successful Google Ads strategy tailored to your business needs.