Key takeaways
- Almost £880,000 of live UK Google Ads spend analysed in a single quarter, on top of 3,000+ audits since 2017.
- At least 56% of active accounts have a conversion-tracking fault serious enough to distort the numbers they optimise on, and that is the floor.
- The median account puts around 20% of its search spend into keywords that are not pulling their weight.
- Spending more is not the problem: the same advertisers spent around 19% more year on year and it broadly paid off.
- Around a third of UK Google Ads spend now goes to Performance Max, a channel whose reported return Google won’t let you fully verify.
Every quarter we take an anonymised look across the live UK Google Ads accounts in our audit programme. We are not looking for reasons to spend more. We are looking for money that is already going to waste. This is the first of those reports.
The short version: more businesses are spending more on Google Ads than at any point in the last year, and broadly it is working. But two problems show up again and again, and a bigger budget fixes neither. Most accounts cannot fully trust their own numbers. And even by the numbers they can see, roughly one pound in every five of search spend does no real work.
of accounts can’t fully trust their conversion data (floor)
of search spend not pulling its weight (median)
of clicks lost to capped budgets (median)
more spend year on year, and it paid off
of spend now goes to Performance Max
of live UK spend analysed in one quarter
Source: PPC Geeks, Q1 2026 (January to March). Figures are floors or medians. See the methodology below.
UK Google Ads spend: the headline findings
For Q1 2026 (January to March), across the live UK accounts we analysed:
- At least 56% of active accounts have a conversion-tracking fault serious enough to distort the numbers they optimise on. That is the floor, not the ceiling.
- The median account puts around 20% of its search spend into keywords that do no real work.
- The median account loses around 18% of its search clicks to capped budgets. Two in three lose more than one click in ten.
- The same advertisers spent around 19% more year on year, and it broadly paid off.
- Around a third of UK Google Ads spend now goes to Performance Max.
- We analysed almost £880,000 of live UK spend in a single quarter, on top of the 3,000 or so audits we have run since 2017.
Finding 1: in most accounts, the numbers cannot be trusted
Before you can improve a Google Ads account, you have to measure it. That is where most accounts fall down. In at least 56% of the active accounts we looked at this quarter, distorted conversion tracking meant the figures the business optimised towards did not reflect reality. More than half were letting Google’s automated bidding optimise on the wrong data.
That 56% is the cautious figure. It counts only the faults we can prove from the outside. The faults we cannot see from an audit, like consent settings and tag errors, would only push the number higher.
Conversion tracking is the postcode in your satnav. Put the wrong one in and you will never reach where you are going, no matter how hard you drive. Optimise from bad data and you will never get the results you are after.
Dan Trotter, Head of PPC, PPC Geeks
Finding 2: even the numbers you can see show waste
Suppose an account’s data is sound. We still found a serious amount of spend doing no work. Across the accounts we could measure properly, around 20% of search spend went to keywords that did no real work. The median account sat right on that mark, and more than a third ran above 30%.
That waste came in two shapes. First, keywords that converted nothing at all while still taking budget. Second, keywords that did convert, but at more than three times the account’s own average cost. We are careful here. Some of that spend defends a brand, or supports a sale that never shows on a last-click report. So we would never call all 20% pure waste. But most of it is genuinely reclaimable. That 20% is not a reason to panic. It is growth you have already paid for.
Finding 3: two in three accounts leave clicks on the table
A fifth of spend goes to the wrong clicks. Meanwhile the budget often runs out before demand does, so the account never buys plenty of the right ones. The median account loses around 18% of its available search clicks to capped budgets. 33 of the 55 accounts we measured lose more than one click in ten this way.
Read alongside Finding 2, it is the opposite of a “spend more” nag. Most accounts are simultaneously wasting a fifth of their budget and missing a fifth of their best clicks. The win is moving the money you already spend, not adding to it.
Finding 4: spending more worked, so that is not the trap
It would be easy, and wrong, to turn this into “everyone is wasting money, stop spending”. Like for like, the same UK advertisers spent around 19% more year on year, and it broadly paid off. Conversions rose by roughly a fifth, and the cost per click stayed essentially flat.
We are deliberately careful here. The blended cost per click across the whole book looks like it jumped. But that is a mix artefact, not a real price surge, so we will not claim a “Google Ads is getting more expensive” headline we cannot defend. The honest conclusion is more useful. The problem is not that spending more fails. It is spending more before you fix your tracking and reclaim your wasted fifth.
Finding 5: where a third of UK Google Ads spend really goes
Performance Max is now the elephant in most accounts. Around a third of all UK Google Ads spend in our sample went to it. On reported numbers it looks like a star. Like for like, it showed a return on ad spend of about 4.6, against about 3.2 for standard Search. But that comparison deserves a heavy asterisk, and the asterisk is the story.
Brand and Shopping cannibalisation flatter Performance Max’s reported return. When we looked at what it was actually buying, the top converters were frequently the client’s own brand name, and generic terms converted close to nothing. The single biggest category of activity was the one Google labels as unknown. The platform cannot prove its conversions are incremental, and it withholds most of the query data that would let anyone check. A third of the nation’s Google Ads budget now flows into a channel that grades much of its own homework.
What this means for your Google Ads spend
Put the findings together and a clear order of operations falls out. It is not exciting, and it costs nothing extra, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
- Fix the tracking first. Optimising on bad data just makes you confidently wrong, faster.
- Reclaim the wasted fifth. Move budget off the keywords that convert nothing, or convert far too expensively, and onto the ones that demonstrably sell.
- Then, and only then, think about spending more, and watch Performance Max with clear eyes when you do.
How UK Google Ads spend compares with the wider market
Our findings are first-party, pulled from real accounts rather than a survey, but they do not sit in isolation. Demand for Google Ads in the UK has never been higher. UK search interest reached its highest level on record in Q1 2026, peaking in March.
Budgets are rising too, and independent data agrees. The IPA Bellwether report for Q1 2026 found UK marketing budgets revised up to their highest level in nearly two years, with online channels among the biggest gainers. That mirrors the 19% rise we measured. Our waste figure also sits inside independent estimates, which commonly land in the 15 to 40% range. And the Performance Max caveat is not just our scepticism. Independent marketing-mix studies repeatedly find that platform-reported return overstates true incremental return, and that branded-search overlap is a recognised cost of running it.
About this data
These figures come from the live UK Google Ads accounts in PPC Geeks’ audit programme, analysed anonymously and in aggregate for Q1 2026. That is 78 enabled accounts, 55 with meaningful spend, depending on the measure. We name no client, and no one can identify a single account. Several of our numbers are deliberately cautious floors. Where the account data alone cannot reveal a fault, we have said so and given the conservative figure.
PPC Geeks is a UK PPC agency working across Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and TikTok. If you would like an honest look at where your own account stands, tracking included, our free Google Ads audit does exactly that. No pressure to spend more. Just the truth about the money you already spend.
Frequently asked questions
How can I tell if my Google Ads conversion tracking is wrong?
Compare the platform’s conversion count to your real inbox or sales; check whether several conversion actions are all marked ‘primary’ (a common double-count); and be wary if website activity is being counted as a conversion.
How much Google Ads search spend is typically wasted?
Across the live UK accounts PPC Geeks analysed in Q1 2026, the median account put around 20% of its search spend into keywords that converted nothing or cost more than three times its own average. Independent estimates commonly land in the 15 to 40% range.
Is Performance Max’s reported ROAS reliable?
Treat it sceptically. Brand and Shopping cannibalisation flatter its reported return, Google withholds most of the query data, and the platform cannot prove the conversions are incremental.
