Last updated on April 1, 2026 by Siliveru Rakesh
If you’re running paid search ads, and you’re a personal injury law firm or a home services business, your budget is almost certainly one of the highest-cost line items in your marketing plan. Keywords in these categories are expensive. Competition is fierce. Margins for error are thin.
So when an Google ad agency is setting up your campaigns, the stakes are real. A few wrong settings and you’re burning thousands of dollars a month on clicks that will never become clients or customers.
We’ve audited a lot of paid search accounts. The same mistakes show up again and again. Most aren’t complicated; they’re just overlooked.
Here are 15 specific red flags that signal your agency isn’t managing your campaigns the way they should be.
1. Your Campaigns Are Structured Too Broadly
A PI law firm that handles car accidents, slip-and-fall cases, medical malpractice, and workers’ comp shouldn’t group all of these into a single campaign. Neither should an HVAC company lump heating repairs, AC installs, and maintenance agreements together.
When everything shares one budget and one set of settings, you lose control. You can’t tell which service lines are performing, you can’t shift budget intelligently, and the agency can’t tailor ad copy to match specific search intent.
The fix is simple: Break campaigns out by practice area or service type. It takes more setup, but it’s the only way to know what’s actually working.
2. Broad Match Keywords Are Running Without Proper Guardrails
Broad match keywords can make sense in some contexts, but in high-CPC categories like legal and home services, they’re a liability without tight negative keyword lists.
A PI attorney bidding broadly on “accident lawyer” will end up paying for searches like “accident lawyer jokes,” “accident lawyer salary,” and “how to become an accident lawyer.” A plumber bidding broadly on “plumbing” will show up for “plumbing diagrams,” and “plumbing DIY.” Neither of these turns into a qualified call.
Phrase and exact match should be the foundation of any campaign in these industries. If broad match is used, it should be a tested add-on rather than the default.
3. Your Ads Are Showing Outside Your Actual Service Area
Surprisingly common, it’s often the result of a single dropdown in campaign settings being set to “presence of interest in” instead of “presence in.”
That distinction matters enormously. For a personal injury attorney licensed in Texas, paying for clicks from California is pure waste. For a roofing company that serves a 40-mile radius, running statewide ads is just burning money.
Ask your agency to show you a geographic performance report. If your’e seeing significant spend or clicks from outside your service areas, the targeting settings need to be corrected immediately.
4. The Account Change History is Mostly Empty
Log into your Google Ads account and look at the change history. If you see entries from months ago and not much since, that’s a sign your agency has been on autopilot.
Paid search accounts need regular attention — bidding adjustments, negative keyword additions, ad copy tests, budget reallocations based on performance. If the account isn’t changing, it isn’t improving.
Ask your agency for a monthly optimization log. It doesn’t need to be elaborate, but it should demonstrate that someone is actively managing the account, not just cashing a management fee.
5. Ad Copy is Incomplete and Extensions Are Missing
Google’s Responsive Search Ads allow for multiple headlines and descriptions. Many agencies fill in the minimum and leave the rest blank. That’s a missed opportunity. More copy variations mean better chances of matching what a specific person is searching for.
Extensions are even more commonly overlooked. For personal injury attorneys and home services companies, call extensions, location extensions, and sitelinks are not optional. They increase the size and visibility of your ads on the results page and give searchers more reasons to click or call you directly without ever visiting your website.
A fully built-out ad simply performs better than a partially built one. There’s no reason not to use everything available to you.
6. Brand and Non-Brand Keywords Are In the Same Campaign
Branded searches, where people search for your firm’s name or your business name, are your highest-intent, lowest-cost clicks. Someone searching for you by name already knows who you are. That’s a near-certain conversion.
When branded and non-branded keywords share a campaign and a budget, the non-branded keywords almost always consume the majority of spend because they require higher bids to be competitive. Your branded searches end up getting pushed out.
These should always be in a separate campaign with separate budgets. Branded campaigns should never run out of money.
7. Conversion Tracking Isn’t Set Up Properly
If your agency can’t tell you exactly how many phone calls and form fills came from paid search with confidence, that’s a problem.
Broken or improperly configured conversion tracking is one of the most consequential mistakes an agency can make, because everything downstream depends on it. Bidding strategies, budget decisions, and performance reporting are all built on conversion data. If the data is wrong, every decision based on it is wrong too.
Before trusting any performance numbers, make sure conversions are tested, verified, and free from double-counting. This should be done at setup and revisited whenever changes are made to your website or tracking.
8. Conversion Actions Don’t Reflect What Really Matters to Your Business
Even when tracking is working, agencies sometimes count the wrong things. Visits to a thank-you page might be firing twice. A PDF download might be counting as a lead. A soft micro-conversion might be weighted the same as an actual phone call inquiry.
For PI attorneys, a qualified case lead is very different from a general site visit. For HVAC companies, a booked appointment is very different from a map view.
Work with your agency to agree on what a conversion means for your specific business, and confirm the campaign’s optimization goals match that definition.
9. Google Search Partners is Turned On
Google Search Partners extends your ads beyond Google’s own search results to a network of third-party sites. The traffic quality is often poor, sometimes bot-like, and it can make your campaign look more efficient than it really is by artificially inflating click volume while reducing average cost-per-click (CPC).
For high-intent categories like legal and home services, you want precise reach, not broad reach. Search Partners should generally be disabled, especially for non-branded campaigns.
Check your campaign settings. If Search Partners is on and your agency hasn’t explicitly explained why, it’s likely just a default that was never turned off.
10. Phone Calls Aren’t Being Tracked
This might be the most important one on this list for PI attorneys and home services businesses. Most of your best leads call. They don’t fill out a form, they pick up the phone.
If your agency isn’t tracking phone calls from ads or landing pages, they’re missing the majority of the picture. You have no idea which keywords, campaigns, or ads are actually driving calls.
Good call tracking goes beyond just counting calls. A solid setup uses call duration thresholds or AI-based intent signals to separate quality calls from wrong numbers and short hang-ups, so your data actually reflects real lead activity.
If you’re not doing this, start now. It’s one of the highest-value things you can add to any paid search program.
11. No Click Fraud or IP Exclusion Protection
Competitors, bots, and repeat visitors clicking your ads without any intent to convert is a real and ongoing problem, especially in high-CPC categories like legal and home services.
If your agency isn’t monitoring for fraudulent clicks or excluding known bad IPs, you’re paying for traffic that will never become a lead. A click fraud protection tool combined with regular IP exclusion audits is basic due diligence.
12. Your Landing Page Doesn’t Match Your Ad
If someone clicks an ad for “emergency AC repair” and lands on your homepage, you’ve already lost them. Message match — the alignment between what the ad promises and what the landing page delivers — is one of the most direct levers for conversion rate.
Every campaign should have a dedicated landing page that mirrors the ad’s headline, offer, and intent.
13. Your Landing Pages Are Too Slow, And It’s Killing Your Quality Score.
Google grades your ads partly on the quality of the landing page experience, including how fast it loads. A slow page raises your cost-per-click and lowers your ad position.
Meaning you pay more and show up less. Run your landing pages through Google PageSpeed Insights. If you’re scoring below 70 on mobile, that’s costing you money on every single click.
14. Smart Bidding is Running Without Enough Conversion Data
Google’s Smart Bidding strategies, especially Maximize Conversions, need a minimum of 30-50 conversions per month before the algorithm has enough signal to optimize effectively.
Below that threshold, it’s essentially guessing. Agencies often enable it immediately because it sounds sophisticated, but on a new or low-volume account it will burn through budget fast. Manual or enhanced CPC bidding is the right starting point until the data is there.
15. No Remarketing, Audience Lists, or In-Market Audiences
If your campaigns aren’t using remarketing lists, in-market audiences, or affinity segments, you’re leaving significant efficiency on the table. Someone who visited your personal injury intake page last week is a far better prospect than a cold visitor, and they should be bid on differently.
In-market audiences for services such as “legal services” or “home improvement” let you layer intent signals on top of keyword targeting. Ignoring these tools means treating every click as equal when they’re not.
What To Do If Any of These Sound Familiar
None of these issues are obscure. They’re the kind of mistakes that come from agencies treating your account like a commodity. Set it up, turn it on, and collect a management fee.
If you recognized your account in several of these, it’s worth getting an outside perspective. At New Path Digital, we specialize in paid search for personal injury attorneys and home services businesses. We know what these campaigns should look like, and we know what’s costing you money.
If you’d like us to take a look at your account and tell you exactly where you stand, get in touch. We’ll give you an honest assessment.
