Google Ads work. That's not the question. The question is why yours aren't. The answer is almost always one of the same five things.
← Back to InsightsGoogle's default keyword match type is broad match, which means your ad can show for searches loosely related to your keyword. If you're targeting "marketing agency London," broad match will show your ad for "marketing jobs London," "free marketing tools" and "what is a marketing agency." You're paying for clicks from people who will never buy from you.
The fix: use exact match or phrase match for your core terms, build a negative keyword list from your search terms report and review it weekly. Most new Google Ads accounts have zero negative keywords. That alone explains a lot of wasted spend.
How to check: In your Google Ads account, go to Keywords → Search terms. Filter by impressions. Look at what searches actually triggered your ads. If more than 20% of them are irrelevant to what you sell, broad match is costing you.
The most common Google Ads mistake: running ads to your homepage. Your homepage is designed to introduce your business to an unfamiliar visitor. It has navigation, multiple services, probably a blog section. It is not designed to convert someone who just searched for a specific thing.
Dedicated landing pages (one per campaign, one message, one CTA) consistently outperform homepage traffic by 2–5x on conversion rate. If you're not using them, you're paying for clicks you're not converting.
How to check: In your campaign settings, look at the final URL for each ad. If it ends in "/" or "/about" or "/services," you're sending paid traffic to the wrong destination. Your landing page URL should describe the specific thing you're advertising.
Google's Smart campaigns and Performance Max are designed to simplify campaign management by letting Google's algorithm handle targeting, bidding and placement. For large advertisers with extensive conversion data, they can work well. For most small businesses, they function as a mechanism for Google to spend your budget across placements and audiences you would never have chosen, optimising for conversions that may not be the ones you actually care about.
The loss of control is not a feature. It's a liability until you have significant conversion volume feeding the algorithm.
How to check: Look at your campaign type in the Campaigns tab. If it says "Smart" or "Performance Max," open the placement report and the asset group breakdown. If you can't see which search terms triggered your ads or which placements got your spend, that's the problem in plain sight.
If you don't have conversion tracking set up correctly, Google's algorithm is optimising for clicks, not outcomes. You might be getting traffic, but Google has no signal telling it which traffic turned into enquiries. Without that signal, the algorithm can't improve. And you can't report on cost per lead, can't identify which keywords are converting and can't make any data-based decision about what to do next.
This is the single most common setup error we see in inherited Google Ads accounts.
How to check: Go to Tools → Conversions in your Google Ads account. If the list is empty, or if conversions are tracking page views rather than form submissions or calls, you don't have real conversion data. Your campaign is flying blind.
"Experienced marketing agency in London. Contact us today for a quote." That ad runs in a search results page alongside eight other ads that say the same thing in slightly different words. No one clicks it, and when they do, it's because it appeared above a competitor's equally generic ad. It wasn't because it said anything compelling.
The ad copy has one job: give someone who just searched for your keyword a specific reason to click your result over the others. That means naming the thing that makes you different, in the headline, not buried in description line two.
How to check: Search for your own target keyword in an incognito window and read your ad alongside your competitors'. If you can swap your headline for a competitor's without anyone noticing, it isn't working hard enough.
If your daily budget is £10 and you're targeting high-competition commercial keywords in London, your campaign will run out of budget before 9:30am and go dark for the rest of the day. Google will show your ad when it can afford to, not when your prospects are actually searching. The result is partial market coverage, data that doesn't reflect real performance and a conclusion that "Google Ads doesn't work." The real problem is budget vs. keyword competition mismatch.
How to check: In your campaign overview, look for the "Budget lost impression share" column. If that figure is above 15%, your budget is limiting your reach. Also check the average CPC for your top keywords using the Keyword Planner. If your daily budget covers fewer than ten clicks per day, you don't yet have enough volume to generate consistent leads or feed the algorithm.
If any of these sound familiar, get in touch and we'll run a review of your current account: what's wasting budget, what needs fixing and what a properly structured campaign could realistically deliver.
GET YOUR ADS REVIEWED