Why Are My Google Ads Not Working?

This is the most common and most damaging problem we find in underperforming accounts. Without conversion tracking, neither you nor Google knows which clicks turned into calls, form fills, or bookings. Google's Smart Bidding ends up optimising for clicks instead of customers, and every decision made in the account is a guess. Everything else on this list is hard to diagnose until this is fixed, because you can't tell wasted spend from productive spend.

Broad match tells Google to show your ad for anything it considers related. A plumber bidding broad on 'hot water repairs' can end up paying for 'how to fix hot water system yourself'. Google's setup flow and its automated recommendations push advertisers towards broad match because it spends budget faster. In an unwatched account, it typically becomes the single biggest source of wasted spend.

Negative keywords tell Google what you never want to show for: 'free', 'DIY', 'jobs', 'course', 'cheap', competitor names you can't convert. Without them, every one of those searches can cost you money. A healthy account adds negatives every single week as new junk queries appear in the search terms report. An empty negative list is one of the clearest signs an account has been abandoned.

Google's default location setting is 'Presence or interest', which means people outside your area who merely show interest in it can trigger your ads. An Adelaide electrician can quietly pay for clicks from interstate or overseas. The other version of this mistake is targeting all of Australia when you only serve 1 city, spreading a small budget across places you'll never work in.

The click is only half the job. Sending paid traffic to a generic homepage, a slow page, or a page with no obvious way to make contact wastes money even when the targeting is perfect. The page needs to match the search ('blocked drains Adelaide' should land on a blocked drains page), load fast on a phone, and put a phone number and a short form in front of the visitor immediately.

Google scores every keyword from 1 to 10 based on expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Low scores mean you pay more per click than competitors for the same position, sometimes dramatically more. It's Google's way of taxing lazy account structure: 1 generic ad pointing at 1 generic page for 50 loosely related keywords.

The biggest, most generic keyword in your industry is also the one every competitor fights over. Clicks in contested Australian service niches typically run from around $5 to $30 or more, and a small budget aimed at the most expensive term buys a handful of clicks a day - too few to generate steady leads. Longer, more specific searches and suburb-level terms usually cost less and convert better because the intent is clearer.

An account gets built, runs for a while, and then nobody touches it. Search behaviour shifts, competitors change their bids, and Google quietly changes defaults - including auto-applied recommendations that can alter your match types and budgets without anyone deciding it. Google Ads is an auction that reprices itself every day. An account that isn't actively managed drifts towards waste on its own.