How about we start the new year with a list of Google Ads mistakes from 2025 that we need to avoid in 2026?
Let me start.
Top mistakes to avoid in 2026 (based on my 2025 account audits, research, and Strategy Calls):
→ Have your campaign spend $10k in one hour because you accidentally enabled AI Max
→ Copy-paste a faulty URL to Final URL without testing
→ Set audiences to ‘targeting’ instead of ‘observation’ and then wonder where all the traffic went
→ Launch new campaign on Friday afternoon, and then next Monday, find out that it spent the whole month’s budget over the weekend
→ Run PMax without guardrails and be surprised by it doubling spend via non-converting clicks from the Discovery network
→ Forget to change Google’s default location targeting setting and burn $20k on GDN traffic in India for a product only sold in the UK
→ For US advertisers: target the country of Georgia rather than the state of Georgia
→ Forget to hit the Publish button in GTM and then spend >€5000 on clicks only to see zero conversions
→ Import GA4 conversions, forget to set the action as ‘secondary conversion’, and then have to explain why the spend tripled without a corresponding increase in revenue
→ Let PMax auto-expand final URLs on a lead gen site and then see traffic to outdated blog posts explode.
Help me prevent more mistakes by sharing yours? (Hit reply.)
– Nils