Google Ads spends and doesn't sell: where the money leaks

It's one of the conversations we have most often. The ad runs, the dashboard shows clicks, the budget is spent in full every month and nothing changes in the business. When a Google Ads campaign spends and doesn't sell, it's rarely because advertising doesn't work: the money is leaking through places you can see, and fix, in one afternoon.

First: clicks aren't customers

The starting mistake is watching the big number. Clicks and impressions tell you how many people walked past, not how many got in touch. The two numbers that decide whether a campaign is worth it are different: how many enquiries it brought (calls, forms, messages) and what each one cost.

With those two you can do the sum that matters: if an enquiry costs €18 and you close one in five, each customer costs €90 in advertising. From there you know whether the margin holds. Without those numbers, raising or lowering the budget is a coin toss.

The most common leak: which words you're being charged for

Inside the account there's a report almost nobody opens, showing what people actually typed before clicking rather than the keywords you set up. It's the search terms report, it's free, and it's usually the first surprise.

In a renovations campaign you'll find things like "renovation worker salary", "renovation course" or "second-hand bathtubs". People looking for a job, for training, or for a bargain. None of them was going to ask for a quote, and each of those clicks cost the same as a good one.

Negative keywords

The fix is simple and it's called negative keywords: you tell Google not to show you when someone searches "free", "course", "jobs", "second hand" or a competitor's name. Google's help explains how to add them. It isn't a one-off task: new searches appear every week, so you have to go back.

Broad match

The other half of the problem is usually how the keywords were entered. Broad match lets Google interpret and show you on similar searches, some of which are barely similar. It works once you have data and conversions guiding the system; early on, with a small budget, it tends to be expensive.

How to read that report in five minutes

You don't need to know advertising to run this check yourself. Go into your ads account, open the campaign, find the search terms section —depending on the version it sits under "Insights" or "Keywords"— and sort the table by cost, highest first.

Now read the top twenty lines out loud and ask one question of each: could this person have ended up buying from me? The ones that couldn't get ticked and added as negatives. In most accounts we review, somewhere between 20 and 40 % of the spend sits in that group, and it's money you get back the same day.

Repeat weekly for a month, then monthly. It's dull, and it's the change you notice most.

Where the click lands

Second leak: the landing page. Plenty of campaigns send all their traffic to the website's homepage, where the visitor has to hunt for whatever the ad was offering.

A landing page that converts is boringly simple: it says the same thing as the ad, it says it in the first screen, the phone number and WhatsApp are visible, it loads fast on mobile and the form doesn't ask for ten fields. Our plans include a one-page landing for €100 a month for exactly this, hosting included.

One detail that gets forgotten: if the ad promises "a quote in 24 hours", the page has to repeat that promise. When the message changes between ad and page, people leave.

Without conversion tracking you're flying blind

A campaign with no conversion tracking is a campaign that can't improve, because Google's system learns from what you tell it. You have to mark as a conversion what genuinely counts: the form submitted, the call from the ad, the WhatsApp message. Google documents how to set tracking up.

There's a common trap here: counting any visit to the contact page as a conversion. That inflates the numbers and pushes the system towards people who look and never write. Measure what feeds you, not what looks good in a report.

How much to invest to know whether it works

There's no magic figure, and be wary of anyone who gives you one without asking anything. What there is, is a condition: you need enough volume to be able to decide. With two clicks a day you can't tell whether a keyword works, and neither can Google's system.

A healthier way to frame it is backwards: look at the margin a new customer leaves you, decide how many you want a month and work out what cost per enquiry allows that. That number drives the budget, not the other way round. If the sum doesn't work, the problem isn't the campaign: it's the price or the margin, and that's worth knowing before spending.

Keep the split in mind too: the money you put into ads goes straight to Google or Meta, and managing the campaign is a separate thing. We handle that inside the €750 and €1,500 a month plans, where the work of building, reviewing and adjusting sits; the ad spend is your call and you pay it separately.

Ads and SEO don't compete, they take turns

Ads are for today: switch them on and you're at the top that same afternoon. SEO is for a few months from now, and when it arrives the meter stops running. We covered it with real timescales in the article on how long SEO takes to work.

For a local business the sensible route is to start with Ads for movement while SEO and the Google Business Profile gain traction, then reduce the dependence on advertising as traffic you don't pay per click for starts coming in.

Five mistakes we see almost every week

• Never opening the search terms report. That's where the lost money is.
• Sending ads to the homepage instead of a page about what's being advertised.
• Not tracking conversions, or counting anything as one.
• Touching the budget every three days. Every change restarts the system's learning.
• Advertising round the clock across the whole country when the business opens nine to six and serves three districts.

What we do with a campaign

We start by looking at what's already there: the search terms report, negatives, where the click lands and what's being counted as a conversion. That usually gives us the diagnosis in the first week. Then comes the slow part: writing ads that say what the business actually does, getting the landing page in shape and reviewing new terms every week.

It sits inside the monthly plans at €750 and €1,500, alongside the website articles, the Google profile posts and the answered reviews. No lock-in, and with the marketing strategy first, because a campaign with no plan behind it is spending with hope attached.

If you'd like us to look at your account and tell you where it's leaking, message us on WhatsApp. The search terms report and the landing page usually tell most of the story.