What goes wrong with Google Ads campaigns?

Conversion tracking that is not really working

This is the one that invalidates everything else. If the conversion action does not fire, or fires on the wrong thing, then the bidding algorithm is optimising against noise and every report is fiction.

The failure is quiet. The account shows conversions, the numbers look plausible, and nobody checks whether a real form submission actually registered. The test is to submit the form yourself and confirm it appears — not to trust the dashboard.

The landing page does not match the ad

Someone searches for a specific service, clicks an ad promising it, and lands on a homepage that covers eight services. They now have to find what they came for. Most do not.

This costs twice: conversion rate falls, and Google scores landing page relevance into ad rank, so you also pay more per click for the privilege. Every ad group should point at a page about that specific thing, with the action available on the page.

Negative keywords that do not block what you think

A genuine trap with real money attached. Negative keywords do not behave like positive ones.

• A broad-match negative requires every word to be present. Adding "epoxy paint" as a negative does not block "garage floor paint" — there is no "epoxy" in that search.
• Negatives do not match plurals or close variants. Blocking "kit" does not block "kits".
• An exact-match negative blocks only that exact phrase, so "paint" as an exact negative does nothing for "cost to paint garage floor".

Assets that were disapproved and nobody noticed

Call extensions, images and sitelinks can sit disapproved for months while the campaign appears to run normally. A disapproved call asset means the campaign has never shown a phone number — which, for a business whose customers phone, removes the primary conversion path entirely.

Nothing alerts you loudly. Somebody has to open the assets view and look.

The invisible landing page

A landing page that builds itself in the browser hands Google's ad-quality crawler an empty document. It scores the page on what it received, which is nothing, and quality score falls with no obvious cause.

In our audit of 1,348 funded companies, 28 of the sites that render as an empty shell were running Google Ads. They are paying per click for traffic to a page the ad platform cannot read.

Common questions

Why are my Google Ads not converting?

Check in this order: is conversion tracking actually firing, does the landing page match the ad, and are you appearing for searches that indicate buying intent rather than research. Most non-converting accounts fail on the first two.

How often should search terms be reviewed?

Weekly early on. The search terms report shows what people actually typed, which is always broader than the keywords you chose, and it is where wasted spend is found.