You set up the campaign, watched the daily budget tick away, and waited for the phone to ring. It didn't. The dashboard shows clicks, impressions, even a decent CTR - but actual enquiries? Nothing.
This is the most common complaint we hear about Google Ads, and it is rarely one big mistake. It is usually two or three small leaks stacked on top of each other. The good news: every one of them is diagnosable in an afternoon. Work through this list in order.
Google pushes broad match hard because it spends money fast. You bid on "plumbing services" and end up paying for searches like "free plumbing course" or "plumber salary in Chennai".
Open your Search Terms report right now. If you see queries that have nothing to do with what you sell, broad match is your leak - and it is often 30-50% of total spend.
The fix: move your core keywords to phrase or exact match. If you want to keep one broad match campaign for discovery, feed it a strong negative list and audience signals, and give it its own budget so it cannot cannibalise the rest.
Negatives are the drain plug of a Google Ads account. Without them, junk searches slip through no matter which match type you use.
Start with the obvious blockers: "free", "jobs", "salary", "course", "DIY", "cheap" if you are premium. Then mine the Search Terms report every week and add anything irrelevant at the campaign or account level.
A healthy account adds new negatives weekly. If your negative list has not changed in three months, that is not stability - that is neglect, and Google will happily keep charging you for it.
Sometimes the ads are fine and the page kills the lead. Slow load times, a vague headline, a contact form with nine fields, no phone number above the fold - each one quietly bleeds conversions you already paid for.
Test it yourself on a phone over mobile data, not office Wi-Fi. If the page takes more than three seconds to load, or you cannot tell what to do within five seconds of landing, neither can your visitors.
The fix: one clear offer, a form with three fields maximum, a click-to-call button, and proof - reviews, results, real photos - directly below the headline. Match the page headline to the ad the visitor clicked.
There are two failure modes here. Either tracking is broken and Google's bidding algorithm is flying blind, or it is counting the wrong thing - page views, scroll events, or button clicks that never become enquiries.
The second one is sneakier. If Smart Bidding is optimising toward a junk conversion, it will proudly report hundreds of "conversions" while your inbox stays empty.
Check Goals & Conversions in your account. Every primary conversion action should be a real lead event: a form submission, a phone call, a WhatsApp click. Demote everything else to secondary, then give the algorithm two weeks to relearn.
Ten campaigns at a small daily budget each feels diversified. In reality, none of them collect enough data to exit the learning phase, so all ten underperform forever.
Google's automated bidding works best with roughly 30 conversions per month per campaign. Divide your monthly conversions by your campaign count - if the answer is a tiny number, you have your diagnosis.
Consolidate. Pick the two services that make you the most money, pause the rest, and concentrate the full budget there until leads flow consistently. Scale outward only after that.
Run through this checklist and most accounts improve within two to four weeks. DIY stops making sense when the problems stack: broken tracking plus thin budgets plus a weak landing page means every fix depends on another, and testing them one at a time burns months of ad spend.
That is when a structured rebuild by a team that manages Google Ads accounts every day pays for itself - usually out of the waste it removes in the first month.
Tried everything and the account still bleeds money? Get a free audit from Kentaurx.
Usually a mix of broad match pulling irrelevant searches, missing negative keywords, and a landing page that does not convert. Check the Search Terms report first - if the queries look unrelated to your business, fix match types and negatives before touching anything else.
Give a properly tracked campaign two to four weeks and enough budget for at least 20-30 clicks per day. Judging in the first three days, or on a budget too small to gather data, tells you nothing reliable.
There is no magic number, but active accounts typically add negatives every week from the Search Terms report. Hundreds of negatives across account and campaign levels is normal for a mature lead generation account.
If your daily budget cannot buy roughly 10-20 clicks at your keyword's CPC, it is too thin for that keyword set. Either concentrate spend on fewer campaigns and keywords or target lower-competition searches.
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