Why your Google Ads aren't working: no impressions, no clicks or no conversions

"My Google Ads aren't working" nearly always turns out to be one of three quite different problems, each with its own causes. So before you touch the budget, work out which one you've got:

1. Nobody is seeing them. Your ads are barely being shown, or not shown at all.
2. People see them and don't click. The ads appear, and people scroll straight past.
3. People click and nothing happens. They arrive and don't enquire or buy, or they do and you can't see it.

The third is the costliest, because you pay for every visit. But before anything else, rule out the most embarrassing cause of all: enquiries that are happening without anyone recording them. If you can't measure it, every other decision you make is a guess.

Problem one: no impressions

Google lists the usual causes when a campaign gets few or no impressions, meaning it's barely being shown. We check them in this order.

The account itself. A suspended account, a security review or a billing problem stops everything dead. Look for a red banner at the top of the account, and check that your payment method still works.

Status at every level. A campaign can be switched on while every ad group inside it is paused, or every ad has been disapproved for breaking a policy. The status column at campaign, ad group, keyword and ad level usually tells you exactly what's wrong, so check all four.

The dates. A campaign with an end date in the past, or a start date in the future, looks switched on and does nothing. So does a report set to the wrong date range, which is an easy way to panic over nothing.

Budget and bids. If your daily budget is tiny next to what a click costs in your market, or your bids are set very low, you'll barely get into the auction. Google names both as causes.

Targeting that's too narrow. A small radius, a short ad schedule, a narrow audience, few keywords and a long list of negative keywords (the searches you've told Google never to show your ad for) can add up to almost no searches you're eligible for. Google suggests reviewing those negatives, because they often block more than you meant them to.

Campaigns competing with each other. Two campaigns with overlapping keywords end up bidding against each other for the same searches.

Low Ad Rank. Ad Rank is Google's score for where your ad can appear, worked out from your bid and the quality of your ad and the page behind it. A column called "Search lost IS (rank)" shows how often your ad missed out because of that score rather than because of budget. Google's suggested fixes are a higher bid, a stronger ad, and a better page for the clicks to land on.

Automatic bidding with nothing to learn from. If a campaign is set to bid for results but no results are being recorded, or the tracking is set up wrongly, Google says it may show your ads less. That's one of several reasons tracking comes first.

Problem two: impressions but few clicks

If your ads are being shown but not clicked, the problem is almost always the gap between what people searched for and what your ad says.

Read the search terms. The search terms report lists what people actually typed before your ad appeared, and it's often nothing like what you had in mind. If your ads are showing for searches you'd never want, the fix lies in your keywords and negatives, not in the ad.

Make the ad answer the search. Somebody searching for an emergency plumber at eleven at night wants to know you'll come out now. Somebody comparing prices wants a price. An ad that could belong to any of your competitors gets fewer clicks than one that answers the question actually asked.

Use the extras Google gives you. Extra links, short selling points and your phone number, which Google calls sitelinks, callouts and call assets, make an ad bigger and give people more reasons to choose it. They take minutes to add.

Treat Quality Score as a symptom, not a cause. Google is explicit that Quality Score, its rating of how well your ad and page match what people search for, is a diagnostic tool rather than something the auction uses. Its three parts are still useful signposts: how often your ad is likely to be clicked, how relevant it is, and what the page behind it is like, each rated above average, average or below average. A "below average" on relevance usually means the keywords in that ad group are too mixed for one ad to answer them all.

Accept that position and competition matter. In some markets the businesses above you are simply bidding more than you are. That's a decision about budget and value, not about copywriting, and working out whether Google Ads are worth it for you starts with what a click is worth to your business.

Problem three: clicks but no conversions

This is where the money goes, so work through it in order.

1. Is conversion tracking actually working?

An account can track the wrong thing, count the same enquiry twice, or track nothing at all because a website change quietly removed the code. If your analytics records no enquiries either, start by setting up key events in GA4, then build the Google Ads conversion from the key event. Then test it properly:

• Submit a real test enquiry through your own form, and make a test call if you track calls.
• Use Google Tag Assistant to watch the tag, the bit of code that records the enquiry, fire as you do it.
• Check that the conversion appears in Google Ads (it can take some hours) and in the reports you actually use.
• Look at the status of each conversion action in the Google Ads conversions summary. Anything that isn't clearly recording, or hasn't recorded anything for a while, needs investigating.
• Check what's being counted as a result. A page view, or a click on your email address, isn't an enquiry, and counting it as one makes a failing campaign look like a success.

If the tracking was broken, you don't have a conversion problem yet. You have a measurement problem, and you'll need a few weeks of clean data before you judge anything else.

2. Have you had enough clicks to judge?

Before you conclude anything, look at how often the visitors you already get go on to enquire, from any source. If roughly one visitor in fifty enquires, forty ad clicks without an enquiry aren't evidence of anything, but two hundred are. Use your own rate rather than an industry average, because an average across different businesses tells you very little about yours.

3. What are you actually paying for?

Open the search terms report again, this time sorted by cost. You'll usually find money going on searches that were never going to turn into anything: people looking for jobs, for a free version, for a different service with a similar name, or for information rather than a supplier. Add those as negative keywords, and tighten the match types on whichever keywords let them in. Match types decide how loosely Google matches a search to the words you chose, and the broadest catches the most you didn't want.

4. Does the ad match the page?

If somebody searches for a specific service and lands on your homepage, they have to go hunting for the thing they asked about, and plenty of them won't bother. Send each group of keywords to the page that answers it, ideally one built for that search. If you haven't got one, a landing page for your main service is usually the single best investment in the whole account, and there's a landing page structure that converts you can borrow.

5. Is the landing page doing its job?

Open it on your phone and answer honestly:

• Does the headline say the same thing the ad promised?
• Is there one obvious next step, visible without scrolling?
• Does it load quickly? PageSpeed Insights will tell you what is slowing it down.
• Is there proof, such as reviews, clients, accreditations or examples of work?
• Is the form as short as it can be? Every box you ask someone to fill in is one more reason to give up.
• Does the phone number work when you tap it?

6. Are you reaching the right places, at the right times?

Google offers two location settings. One reaches only people who are in your area. The other, which Google recommends on Search, also reaches people who have shown an interest in your area, wherever they happen to be. Google calls them "Presence" and "Presence or interest". For a business that only serves customers nearby, the second can mean paying for clicks from people hundreds of miles away, so check deliberately which one each campaign uses.

Then look at when your enquiries actually arrive. If nobody answers the phone after six, and most of your evening clicks go nowhere, an ad schedule will save you money.

7. Is the offer strong enough?

Sometimes the ads and pages are fine and the offer simply isn't competitive. Search for your own main keyword and read the three ads above yours. What are they promising that you aren't: a price, a guarantee, a faster response, a free first step? You don't have to match them, but you do need a reason to choose you that someone can see in a few seconds.

What to do this week

If you only have an hour, do these in order:

1. Submit a test enquiry and confirm that it's recorded as a conversion.
2. Open the search terms report for the last 30 days, sorted by cost, and add negatives for anything irrelevant.
3. Check the location option on every campaign.
4. Open your landing page on your phone and read it as a stranger would.

Between them, they cover the causes that cost the most money and take the least effort to fix.

When to get help

If you've worked through all of this and the numbers still don't add up, a second pair of eyes on the account is usually quicker than more budget. The Google Ads audit checklist takes you through the whole account in the order to check it, and if you're still deciding whether to be on Google at all, weigh up Meta ads vs Google Ads first.

If you'd like someone to do it with you, our paid ads service covers audits, rebuilds and launches, and a Google Ads launch is a fixed £2,500, including 30 days of changes afterwards.