If your Google Ads are spending money but not bringing in leads or sales, it's almost always for one of six reasons. Five of them can be fixed, usually without spending any more. The sixth is the one nobody wants to hear, and it's the most important to rule out first.
I've lost count of the number of people who've told me Google Ads doesn't work. When I ask why, the story is nearly always the same: they set it up themselves, spent a load of money, never got a result, so it doesn't work. Google Ads does work for most businesses. What usually doesn't work is the way the account was set up, or what happened to it afterwards.
Here are the six reasons I see most, how to spot each one in your own account, and what to do about it.
1. The account was set up without really understanding it
The absolute classic: you open the account and find one campaign called "Campaign 1", one ad group called "Ad group 1", and a long list of keywords dropped into it, some relevant, some not, all sharing the same couple of ads.
Google makes it easy to get started and hard to get right. The setup process steers you towards the campaign types and settings that suit Google, not necessarily the ones that reach the people searching for what you sell. A plumber, a solicitor and an online shop need very different setups, and none of them is the default.
How to spot it: look at your campaigns and ad groups. If there's one ad group covering everything you do, with keywords for different services all mixed together, your ads can't speak to what each person searched for, and you can't see which service is actually making you money.
What to do: split things up so each service or product type has its own ad group, its own ads that match those searches, and ideally its own page on your website. Choose the campaign type for your business deliberately, not by accepting what Google suggests.
2. There's no conversion tracking, or it tracks the wrong thing
If Google doesn't know which clicks turned into enquiries or sales, it can't tell good searches from bad ones, and neither can you. Everything gets judged on clicks, and clicks are easy to buy.
Just as common: tracking exists, but it's measuring something that isn't the business goal. Page views counted as conversions. Every form treated the same, whether it's a quote request or a newsletter signup. An online shop optimising for "add to basket" rather than purchases and their value.
How to spot it: in the left-hand menu, go to Goals, then Conversions. If there's nothing there, or the status says "Inactive" or "No recent conversions", you're flying blind. If there are conversions, compare last month's number with the real enquiries or orders you got from the ads.
What to do: track the actions that make you money, such as calls, quote requests, bookings and purchases with their value, and only those as your main conversions. Then let the account optimise towards them. This is the foundation; nothing else on this list works properly without it.
3. Nobody has touched it for years
"It used to work." I hear this a lot. The account was set up a few years ago, it brought in work, and then it was left to run.
Google Ads doesn't stand still. Ad formats have been retired, matching has become far looser, costs per click have gone up, competitors have improved their ads, and in the meantime Google has been quietly applying its own "recommendations", often raising budgets, adding keywords or broadening targeting without anyone deciding to.
How to spot it: open Change history (in the left-hand menu under Campaigns). If the last change made by a person was a long time ago, and everything since has been made automatically by Google, the account has been drifting. On the Recommendations page, check whether auto-apply is switched on.
What to do: treat it as a new account. Review every campaign against what your business sells today, refresh the ads, switch off auto-apply, and rebuild anything that no longer fits.
4. Nobody has time to check what it's actually doing
This one is completely understandable. You're running a business. Checking the search terms report every week isn't top of the list.
But that report is where the money leaks. Google decides which searches your ads appear for, and it casts the net wider every year. Without someone regularly reading what people actually typed and blocking the irrelevant ones, a growing slice of the budget goes on searches that were never going to become customers: jobs, free versions, DIY guides, other companies' names, things you don't even sell.
How to spot it: go to Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. Set the last 30 days, sort by cost, and read the top 50. Count how many you'd actually want to pay for.
What to do: add the bad ones as negative keywords so your ads stop showing for them, and make it a regular job: weekly while the account is settling, then every couple of weeks. If you genuinely don't have the time, this is the cheapest part of the work to hand to someone else.
5. The website is letting the ads down
The ad's job is to get the right person to click. After that, it's down to the page they land on. A great ad sending people to a slow, confusing or broken page is just a faster way to spend money.
The usual problems: ads that send everyone to the homepage instead of the page for what they searched for; pages that are slow or awkward on a phone; no obvious way to call or get a quote; and forms that don't work. It's always worth testing your own contact form. More often than you'd think, it isn't sending anything.
How to spot it: open the page your ads send people to on your phone, as if you were a customer. Could you tell within five seconds what's on offer and how to get in touch? Then send a test enquiry and check it arrives.
What to do: one clear page per service, a phone number and a short form above the fold, and a quick check that every route to contact you actually works.
6. The product or service isn't viable on Google Ads
This is the hard one. Sometimes the ads aren't the problem; the offer is.
I'm regularly asked to run ads for dropshipping stores, and I almost always say no. Search for most dropshipped products on Google Shopping and you'll find dozens of near-identical listings: the same product, the same photos, from the same supplier. When there's nothing to choose between you and fifty other shops, the only thing left to compete on is price, and better ads can't fix that.
The same applies more widely. If a sale makes you £20 profit, and it typically takes 30 clicks at £1.50 each to win one, every sale costs you £45 in advertising. That isn't something better management can turn around. The numbers have to work before the ads can.
How to spot it: search for what you sell the way a customer would. Look at who else is advertising, what they charge, and what they offer that you don't. Then work out roughly what you can afford to pay to win a customer, and compare it with what clicks actually cost in your market.
What to do: be honest about it. A clearer reason to choose you, better margins, or a different channel might be the answer. It's far cheaper to find that out before spending than after.
So does Google Ads work?
For most businesses with real demand and a sensible margin, yes. Reasons one to five are fixable, and fixing them usually costs less than another month of running the account as it is. Reason six isn't fixable with ads alone, and if that's where you are, you deserve to be told straight rather than sold more management.
That's the point of a health check. I go through your account before we speak, then tell you which of these is holding you back, in order of what's costing you most. Sometimes the answer is a few settings. Occasionally it's that Google Ads isn't the right channel for you. Either way, you'll know.
Quick questions
How long should I give Google Ads before deciding it doesn't work?
Long enough to have a meaningful number of clicks on a properly set-up account, with conversion tracking working. That's usually a few weeks, not a few days. But if it's been running for months with nothing to show for it, waiting longer won't help: something on this list needs fixing.
Will spending more fix it?
Almost never. If the account isn't converting at the current budget, more budget usually means more of the same, faster. Fix what's broken first, then scale up what works.
Can I fix this myself?
Some of it, yes. Checking conversion tracking, reading the search terms report and testing your website forms are all things you can do this afternoon. Restructuring campaigns is where most people find it worth getting help.