Your Google Ads may be blocking your own customers

If your Google Ads account was created from your Business Profile — the "Smart campaign" that Google offers every business owner — there is a list inside it that you have probably never opened. It is called negative keyword themes, and it decides which searches your ad is not allowed to appear for.

What we found in our own account

602 negative keyword themes, generated automatically. We read all of them. 119 were blocking real customer searches — the "near me" phrases, the service name itself, the name of the neighbourhood. The account had been paying for broad, irrelevant clicks while quietly refusing to show up for the exact searches a customer would type.

At ₹400 a day the budget was gone in five days every month. Rebuilt on local search only, with the 119 removed and three pincodes targeted: ₹164 a day for the same local reach. 59% less spend.

How to check yours in ten minutes

1. Open Google Ads → your campaign → Keywords → Negative keyword themes.
2. Read the list. Not skim — read. Look for anything a real customer might type: your service, "near me", "classes", "clinic", your area.
3. Remove those. Leave the ones that are genuinely irrelevant — "jobs", "salary", "free", "course", "wholesale".
4. Then check Locations. Smart campaigns often target a whole city or a radius far larger than anyone would travel.

The bigger problem with Smart campaigns

They optimise for clicks and "conversions" that include things like someone opening your listing — not for calls. A campaign can report hundreds of conversions and produce very few enquiries. If yours looks like that, it usually needs to be rebuilt as a normal Search campaign with your own keywords, your own negatives, an ad schedule that matches when customers call, and conversion tracking on the call button itself.