You set up a Google Ads campaign. The clicks are coming in. The budget is being spent. But the phone is not ringing and the enquiry form is empty. This is one of the most common problems in paid search advertising, and it is almost always caused by one of the same five issues. Understanding which one applies to you is the first step to fixing it.
1. Your ads are attracting the wrong traffic
Google Ads traffic quality depends almost entirely on your keyword targeting and match types. If you are bidding on broad keywords without proper negative keyword lists, your ads will appear for searches that are superficially related to your business but are not from people looking to buy.
A plumber bidding on the broad keyword plumber might get clicks from people searching for plumber salary, plumber apprenticeship or plumber tool kit. Those people have no intention of hiring a plumber. They are clicking your ad out of curiosity and leaving immediately. You pay for every click regardless of the intent behind it.
The fix is to review your search terms report in Google Ads to see exactly what searches triggered your ads. Add anything irrelevant as a negative keyword. Tighten your match types to phrase match or exact match for your highest-value keywords. This single change often dramatically reduces wasted spend and improves the quality of the traffic that does arrive.
2. Your landing page does not match your ad
When someone clicks a Google Ad, they have a specific expectation based on the ad they just read. If your ad promises emergency plumber available now and they land on a generic homepage with no mention of emergency services, they leave immediately. The disconnect between the promise in the ad and the reality of the landing page kills conversions before they happen.
Every ad should go to a dedicated landing page that directly delivers on what the ad promised. The headline of the landing page should match or closely echo the headline of the ad. The call to action should be immediate and unmistakable. The page should have one purpose: getting the visitor to make an enquiry.
3. Your page loads too slowly on mobile
Over 70 percent of Google Ads clicks on local service keywords come from mobile devices. If your landing page takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile connection, a significant proportion of people will abandon it before it finishes loading. They have clicked away before they have even seen your offer.
Test your landing page speed using Google PageSpeed Insights. A score below 70 on mobile is causing you to lose clicks you have already paid for. Fixing page speed issues, particularly image sizes, render-blocking scripts and server response time, directly increases the conversion rate of your existing traffic without spending more on ads.
4. Your call to action is unclear or absent
People arriving from a Google Ad are often in a relatively high-intent state but they will not work hard to figure out how to contact you. If your phone number is buried in the header in small text, if your enquiry form requires more than three fields, or if it is not immediately obvious what the visitor should do next, they will leave without acting.
Your landing page should have your phone number prominent and clickable at the top of the page, a short enquiry form with no more than four fields, and a clear statement of what happens after they contact you. Remove any element on the page that is not directly supporting the conversion.
5. You are not tracking conversions correctly
If your conversion tracking is not set up correctly, you may be generating enquiries that are simply not being attributed to the right campaign. Before concluding that your ads are not working, verify that your conversion tracking is recording calls and form submissions accurately in Google Ads and Google Analytics 4.
Incorrect or missing conversion tracking also means your campaign cannot optimise toward the actions that matter. Google Ads bidding strategies like Target CPA and Target ROAS use conversion data to automatically improve performance. Without accurate data, the algorithm is optimising blindly and performance will be consistently poor.
