When Google Ads "aren't working," it's almost always one of six checkable things, and they have an order. No conversion tracking, or it's set up wrong, so nothing can be measured or steered. Broad-match keywords spending on the wrong searches with no negatives. Too little data for Google's automated bidding to learn. A landing page Google scores against you. The wrong campaign type for the job. Or a leak after the click, where the ad did its job and something downstream lost the lead. Here's how to check each one, in order, using Google's own reports and Google's own words. (Facts checked 5 September 2026.)
Most “why aren't my Google Ads working” articles are a flat list of reasons that ends in “so hire us.” This one is an ordered diagnostic. For each cause, the report to pull, what Google itself says, and what healthy looks like, so you can find the actual problem yourself.
Start here, because if this is broken every other number you're looking at is wrong. Open your conversions in Google Ads and check the status of your conversion actions. If any of your important ones read Inactive, Unverified or Needs Attention, Google isn't reliably recording your leads.
Conversion tracking is how you, in Google's words, “learn which keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns are best at driving valuable customer activity.” Without it, you're guessing, and so is Google's bidding. Google is also blunt that setup matters: “Correctly configuring your conversion actions as primary (biddable) or secondary (observation-only) is critical. Misconfiguring these settings can prevent Smart Bidding from optimizing effectively.”
Healthy looks like: your real goal (a form submit, a phone call, a booking) recording as a verified, active, primary conversion. One note, reporting can lag a few hours, so don't panic if a conversion doesn't appear instantly.
Broad match is Google's default: “Broad match is the default match type that all your keywords are assigned because it is the most comprehensive.” And broad match, again in Google's words, “may show on searches that are related to your keyword, which can include searches that don't contain the direct meaning of your keywords.” Left unwatched, that's how you end up paying for searches with nothing to do with what you sell.
This isn't “broad match is bad.” Google's current position is that “it's critical to use Smart Bidding with broad match,” and it works well when it has strong conversion data to steer it, which loops right back to step one. Broad match plus weak conversion data is the combination that quietly drains a budget.
This is the fix for the last one, and almost nobody does it. Pull the search terms report, which Google describes as the way “to know how your ads performed when triggered by actual searches.” It shows the real words people typed to trigger your ad, and it's usually an eye-opener.
Then add negative keywords, which “let you exclude search terms from your campaigns.” One catch worth knowing: “negative keywords don't match to close variants,” so add the misspellings and variations too. And if an older article told you Performance Max can't take negatives, that's out of date, it now supports campaign-level negative keywords.
Healthy looks like: you check the search terms report regularly and prune the waste before it adds up.
Google's automated strategies need real volume to learn. For Target ROAS on Search and Shopping, Google wants “at least 15 conversions in the past 30 days,” and recommends judging performance “over longer time periods that have at least 30 conversions,” or 50 for Target ROAS. Many small service businesses are well under that, which means the algorithm is effectively guessing.
Two things follow. First, if your budget can't realistically produce that many conversions, that's the real problem, and it's worth doing the maths in the ad-spend guide before blaming the ads. Second, leave it alone to learn: “it can take up to 3 weeks or 1-2 conversion cycles for the bid strategy to calibrate,” and constant fiddling resets the clock. As Google notes, “our algorithms continue to learn even when the bidding status no longer shows 'Learning.'”
Google doesn't just judge your ad, it judges the page behind it. “High quality ads and landing pages are more likely to lead to successful clicks and conversions,” and “higher quality ads typically cost less per click.” Landing page experience is, in Google's definition, “how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.”
So a weak or off-message page costs you twice: fewer conversions, and a higher price for every click. If the ad promises one thing and the page talks about another, you're paying more to convert less.
Healthy looks like: the page picks up exactly where the ad left off and is built to turn the click into a lead. There's a separate guide on why websites don't convert if this is your leak.
The type of campaign has to match the job. In Google's own descriptions: Search puts “text ads on search results that let you reach people while they're searching on Google for the products and services you offer,” Display reaches people “as they browse,” and Performance Max is “a goal-based campaign type that allows performance advertisers to access all Google Ads inventory from a single campaign.”
For a service business chasing ready-to-buy customers, Search intent is usually the point, because those people are actively looking for you. Performance Max can work, but it leans hard on the conversion data from step one to steer itself, so running it with poor tracking is automation pointed at nothing.
Here's the honest close. Even with all six right, an ad's entire job is to earn the click and hand the person to your funnel. If the page doesn't convert, or the lead lands in an inbox nobody watches, “Google Ads don't work” is the wrong conclusion. The ad did its job. The money leaked downstream, in the page or the follow-up.
And one reassurance while we're here: Google may “spend up to twice your average daily budget” on a busy day, but across the month “you will have spent no more than 30.4 times your average daily budget,” so day-to-day swings aren't overspending.
If you've been through this list and you're still not sure where your Google Ads are leaking, that's exactly what a free funnel teardown finds. I look at the whole chain, from the ad to the booking, and tell you the first thing I'd fix. You fund your own ad spend, paid straight to the platform, and you keep what we find either way.
A free funnel teardown looks at the whole chain, from the ad to the booking, and tells you the first thing I'd fix.
Get your free funnel teardownWritten by Mihajlo Poznan, founder of Poznan Digital. Facts checked 5 September 2026 against Google Ads Help, and refreshed on a short cycle because Google changes these pages often. Sources: Google Ads Help documentation on conversion measurement, keyword match types, the search terms report and negative keywords, Smart Bidding and bid-strategy learning, ad quality and landing page experience, campaign types, and average daily budgets. There is no reliable Australian cost-per-click benchmark, so none is quoted.