Why your Google Ads
aren't converting.
Paid media · 9 October 2026 · 4 minute read
Clicks without conversions usually means one of three things: the conversions are happening and not being recorded, you are buying the wrong searches, or the landing page is not matched to what the person searched for.
Check the tracking first. It is free to check, it takes twenty minutes, and if it is broken then every other number you are about to make decisions from is wrong.
Rule out a tracking problem first
An account that reports zero conversions and an account that is converting fine but failing to record it look identical in the interface. The difference is that one needs rebuilding and the other needs a tag fixed.
Three checks, in order.
- Submit a test enquiry yourself. Fill in the form, from a phone, as a real person would. Then look for it in your conversion reporting. Not in your inbox: in the reporting.
- Check what is counted as a conversion. Accounts frequently count page views, button clicks and scroll depth as conversions, often because they were set up that way by default. If "conversions" includes someone scrolling, the number is decoration.
- Check for duplicates. A conversion tag firing twice, or both a tag and an imported analytics conversion counting the same event, will make performance look better than it is and send automated bidding chasing phantoms.
If you only do one thing from this article, do this one.
Search terms, not keywords
Keywords are what you asked to appear for. Search terms are what people actually typed. These two lists are rarely as close as advertisers assume, and the gap is where budget disappears.
Open the search terms report and read it line by line for the last thirty days. You are looking for three patterns.
- Research intent. Anything beginning with "how to", "what is", "DIY" or "free" is usually someone who is not going to buy today.
- Wrong service. Terms for things you do not sell, or do not want to sell.
- Wrong place. If you serve one city, terms naming other cities are spend you will never recover.
Add negative keywords for what you find, then make it a weekly habit for the first month and monthly after that.
Broad match and the automation problem
Broad match combined with automated bidding can work well, but only once the system has enough good conversion data to learn from. Starting there, on a small budget, with tracking that may be wrong, is how accounts end up buying traffic that has little to do with the business.
On a small budget, starting tighter and loosening deliberately gives you something that broad match does not: the ability to tell what actually worked.
Automation is good at optimising toward a target. It is not good at telling you the target is wrong.
Match the page to the search
If someone searches for a specific service and lands on your homepage, you have asked them to do the work of finding the relevant page. A share of them will not.
The rule is simple: the headline of the page should contain the thing the person searched for, or something a reasonable person would recognise as the same thing. If the ad promises one thing and the page opens with another, the mismatch costs you twice, once in conversion rate and once in quality score.
Be patient with small numbers
At small budgets you may only be getting a few conversions a week. At that volume, a bad week and a good week are mostly noise. Changing the campaign every Monday based on last week's number means the account never settles long enough to tell you anything.
Give a change enough time and enough conversions to be readable before judging it. If that feels slow, the honest conclusion is usually that the budget is too small for the number of things being tested at once, and the fix is to test fewer things.
The phone call problem
If a meaningful share of your enquiries arrive by phone, and calls are not being tracked, your reporting is systematically understating performance. The campaigns that drive calls will look worse than the ones that drive form fills, and if you are optimising on that data you will gradually defund the thing that is working.
Call tracking is not complicated to set up and it frequently changes the picture more than any bid adjustment.
A checking order
- Test a real conversion end to end and confirm it is recorded.
- Check what is being counted as a conversion, and remove anything that is not a real enquiry.
- Read the search terms report and add negatives.
- Confirm location targeting is set to presence, not interest, if you serve one area.
- Check each ad group lands on a page that matches its search.
- Check the landing page on a phone, including speed.
- Add call tracking if phone enquiries matter.
- Only then change bidding strategy or budget.
Most accounts I look at have a problem somewhere in the first four steps, which is good news, because those are the cheap ones to fix.
Common questions
How long before Google Ads start working?
Expect a few weeks before the data is readable, and longer on a small budget because readability depends on conversion volume rather than elapsed time. If a campaign has produced a handful of conversions, there is not yet enough there to judge it, regardless of how many days it has run.
Why are my clicks so expensive?
Usually competition in the auction, but check the cheaper explanations first: broad targeting pulling in searches you do not want, a low quality score from a mismatch between ad and landing page, or bidding on head terms when longer and more specific searches would convert better and cost less.
Should I use broad match?
It can work well once the account has reliable conversion tracking and enough conversion volume for automated bidding to learn from. Starting with broad match on a small budget, before either of those is true, tends to buy a lot of traffic that is loosely related to the business.
Is it the ads or the landing page?
Compare click through rate and conversion rate. Healthy click through with poor conversion points at the page. Poor click through points at the ad or the targeting. If both are poor, the problem is usually that you are appearing for the wrong searches.
Where to start
Not sure which of these is costing you the most?
I'll look at your website, your social presence and how you show up in local search, and tell you plainly which one is the problem. Written findings in five business days. All I need is your website address.