Google Ads not converting: clicks and spend, but no enquiries

The card statement shows the monthly charge from Google, the account shows clicks every day, and the inbox shows nothing you could call an enquiry. Somebody suggests raising the budget; somebody else says Google Ads not converting is just how it is in your trade.

In our audits neither is usually true. Between a search and an enquiry there are only a few places where the customer can get lost, and each leaves a trace in the account, on the landing page or in the inbox. An evening with the account open is enough to find which one is yours, before any budget changes.

Why Google Ads not converting happens

The enquiries are happening and nobody is counting them. Conversion tracking is the part of an account most often set up wrong or left half done: the tag fires on the wrong page, the form was rebuilt and the thank-you page changed, calls are not tracked, or the action counts a button press as an enquiry. Every decision made on those numbers is then wrong. The sign: emails or calls do arrive, but the conversions column stays at zero or moves without any relation to the inbox.

The clicks are coming from the wrong searches. An ad for a service is shown for searches about jobs, free templates, how-to questions, a namesake product or a city you do not serve, because keyword matching is looser than the words you typed. These people click, look and leave, and you pay for each. The sign: the search terms report is full of searches you would never want to answer.

The page cannot turn a visitor into an enquiry. The ad promised one thing and the page opens on the homepage, or on a page that says everything about the company and nothing about that offer. The phone number is an image, the form is long, the button is far below, or on a phone the form simply does not send. The sign: visitors from ads leave in seconds, while people from other sources behave better on the same page.

The settings show the ad to the wrong people at the wrong time. Location set to people interested in your country rather than in it, languages that include everyone, ads running at night when nobody answers the phone. The sign: clicks from places or languages you do not serve, and calls that arrive when the office is closed.

The offer does not survive contact with the price or the next step. Everyone else on the results page names a price, a delivery time or a free first step, and yours asks people to request a quote. The customer chooses the one who told them what happens next. The sign: search terms are right, the page works, visits are long, and enquiries still do not come.

There is one more place where the customer is lost after the account has done its job: the enquiry arrives and is answered a day later, or lands in a mailbox nobody checks. That is a sales problem dressed as an advertising problem, and the cheapest to fix.

How to tell which one is yours

You need the account login, your website on a phone and the inbox where enquiries land. Go in order; the first check that fails is usually the cause.

1. Count real enquiries from the last month by hand. Emails, form messages, calls, chat, whatever counts as a lead in your business. Write the number down before you open the account.
2. Open the conversion actions and read what each one counts. Page view, form submission, call, button click. Compare the recorded conversions for the month with your hand count. A gap in either direction means the tracking, not the campaign, is the first problem.
3. Submit a test enquiry from your phone. Use the ad’s landing page, send the form, and see whether it arrives and whether the conversion appears in the account within a day. If it does not arrive, nothing else matters yet.
4. Read the search terms report for the last month. Sort by cost and mark every search you would not want to pay for. If those searches take a large share of the spend, that is your leak.
5. Check the location, language and schedule settings. Location should be people in your area, not people interested in it; the language, the one your page is written in; the schedule, when somebody can answer.
6. Click your own ad from a phone and try to become a customer. Does the page repeat the promise of the ad, show a price or the next step without scrolling, offer a tap-to-call number and a short form that sends?
7. Look at what happened to the last ten enquiries. How quickly each was answered, by whom, and where it went afterwards. If the answer is “not sure”, the leak is after the click.

The fix, in order

Cheapest first. Most of this is done by the owner in the account and on the site, before anyone touches bids or budgets.

1. Make the tracking tell the truth. One conversion action per real enquiry type: form sent, call from the ad, call from the site, chat started. Demote page views and button clicks. Test each with your own phone and check the account the next day. Until this is done, everything below is guesswork.
2. Stop paying for the wrong searches. Add the searches you marked as negative keywords, tighten match types on the keywords that brought them, and give the searches that matter their own ad groups with their own ad and page. Repeat monthly; new junk appears as the account grows. This routine decides whether paid advertising campaigns get cheaper or dearer over time, the same lever as in why the cost of every lead keeps rising.
3. Fix the settings you inherited. Location targeting on presence, languages limited to the ones you serve, an ad schedule that matches your answering hours.
4. Give each ad group a page that finishes the ad’s sentence. Same offer in the headline, the price or the next step visible without scrolling, a tap-to-call number, a form with as few fields as the first conversation needs. If the site cannot do this, one landing page is a smaller job than a redesign; in our website projects the enquiry path is tested from a phone before launch. Visitors who behave equally badly from every source point to the site rather than the ads, a different problem with its own checklist.
5. Answer the price question on the page. A starting price, a range with what it depends on, a free first step, a delivery time. Whatever you tell people on the phone anyway, write on the page; it filters out the wrong enquiries and lets the right ones act.
6. Close the gap after the click. Every enquiry goes into one place, gets a named owner and a reply within working hours, and its source is recorded so you can later see which campaign paid for itself. Our CRM and analytics projects start with exactly this: an account that finally converts is wasted on a mailbox nobody reads.
7. Only now change budgets and bidding. With honest tracking, clean searches and a page that works, the account has real conversions to learn from. Doing this first only buys more of the same clicks.

What to measure

• Recorded conversions against your hand count of enquiries, monthly; when they match, the account can be trusted.
• Share of spend on searches you would not want, from the search terms report, monthly; it should fall after each round of negatives.
• Enquiries per visit from ads on the landing page, against the same page from other sources, a few weeks after the page changes.
• Time to first reply and the source recorded for each enquiry, weekly, from the CRM or the inbox.

Where we come in

An owner with the account login and an evening can find the leak and usually close the first few. What we bring is the order and the habit: tracking that is tested rather than assumed, a monthly pass through the search terms, a landing page built around the way ad visitors arrive, and enquiries that land where someone is responsible for them. If you would rather hand over the diagnosis, a short brief with the account and the page you send traffic to is enough to start.

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