- Why aren't my Google Ads working?
- Are your ads even showing (or is it a settings problem)?
- Are you getting clicks but no calls?
- Are you getting calls but no booked jobs?
- Is your conversion tracking lying to you?
- Are your keywords and match types bleeding budget?
- Is your budget too low to escape the learning phase?
- Is your location targeting wasting spend?
- How to run the full diagnosis (in order)
- FAQ
Why aren’t my Google Ads working?
Because something in the account is leaking, not because Google Ads is broken. That is the honest answer for almost every contractor who searches this. The platform works. Plumbers, roofers, and HVAC companies book jobs from it every day. When it fails, it is one of a short list of fixable leaks, and the leak is often past the click, not before it.
The trap is turning the campaign off. That fixes nothing and throws away the data you paid for. Instead, run the diagnosis in order. Start at the top: are the ads even showing? Then work down to the leak that catches most people, are you booking the calls you already paid for? Each section below is one rung of that ladder.
Are your ads even showing (or is it a settings problem)?
First, confirm the ads are actually running. Do not search Google for your own ad, because that racks up impressions with no clicks and can hurt you. Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool inside the account instead. You will find it under Tools, then Troubleshooting. Type in a search term, set the location, and it tells you if your ad can show, and if not, why.
The usual causes are dull, which is good news. The campaign or ad is paused. The ad was disapproved for a policy issue. A billing problem stopped delivery. The daily budget is capped. Or the targeting is so narrow that almost nobody qualifies. Each has a fix inside settings.
Two quick checks people forget. If you suspect a wider outage, the Google Ads Status Dashboard shows whether Google itself has a problem. It rarely does. And if your account is fully offline with a warning banner, that is a different failure. See account suspended.
Are you getting clicks but no calls?
If the clicks come but the phone stays quiet, the leak is between the click and the call. Almost always it is the landing page. The click lands somewhere that does not match what the person searched, so they leave. A burst-pipe searcher who lands on your general homepage has to hunt for the emergency page. Most will not.
Fix the destination. Send each service ad to a page about that exact service. One headline that mirrors the search. A tap-to-call button at the top, because most of these searches happen on a phone. If the page is fine but the wrong people are clicking, the problem is upstream in your keywords, covered below.
Are you getting calls but no booked jobs?
This is the leak nobody wants to look at, and it is the most common one. The ads work. The phone rings. And the jobs still do not land, because the calls are not answered fast enough or followed up at all. Your ad money is fine. Your response is the hole.
The numbers are blunt. 95% of home-services companies do not answer a web lead within 5 minutes, and 40% never answer at all. Yet call a lead within 5 minutes and your odds of qualifying it are 21x higher than at 30 minutes. Miss the window and you paid $104 for that lead to hand it to the contractor who picked up. No bid change fixes a phone nobody answers.
Check this yourself instead of taking anyone’s word for it. Ring your own number at 4pm on a Friday and see what happens. Then find out who covers the phone while the whole crew is on site, and what happens to a form that lands at 7pm. If the honest answer is “whoever is free”, that is your leak, and it is cheaper to fix than anything in the ads account.
Is your conversion tracking lying to you?
Broken tracking is the silent killer, because it does not look like a problem. It looks like the account is working while it quietly rots. If Google counts a 3-second wrong number as a conversion, it learns to buy more calls like that. Your bids chase junk. The account optimises toward noise, and you cannot see why.
Check that conversions count only real leads. Calls only past a set length, not every tap on your number. Google’s own rule: you set a minimum call length, and every call that lasts at least that long counts as a conversion.[3] Forms counted once. No stray “page view” actions padding the total. If the data is dirty, fix it before anything else.
There is a second half to this that no setting covers. If you want to know which ads bring work rather than leads, somebody has to write down which leads booked. Google cannot see your job book. Give that to the person who already schedules the work, so the answer exists before you go looking for it. The guide to tracking calls and forms walks through it.
Are your keywords and match types bleeding budget?
If the budget vanishes on clicks that never book, your keywords are pulling in the wrong searches. Broad match with no strong negative list is the classic cause. It catches “roofing jobs hiring,” “how to fix a tap yourself,” “HVAC parts wholesale,” and the town you do not serve, and you pay for every one. Google gets no signal that these clicks are worthless, so it keeps buying them.
Two fixes. Read the search terms report and add the junk as negative keywords, every week. And rein in loose broad match with tighter control. Match types and a proper block list are how you hold broad match in check so it scales without bleeding.
Is your budget too low to escape the learning phase?
Smart Bidding needs a run of conversions to learn what a booked job looks like. A budget too small never gives it that. The campaign stays stuck in a wobbly, guessing state and never settles. This is not the platform failing. It is being asked to learn on too little data.
At a $104 blended cost per lead, a budget that buys only a handful of leads a month cannot gather a real sample. One bad week erases it. Either fund the account enough to gather data, or hold off until you can. And set your expectations right: a new account is a data-gathering job, with a clear picture at about three months, not week one. The budget guide and the first 90 days guide set the numbers.
Is your location targeting wasting spend?
Location settings leak quietly, because the default costs you and looks fine. Google’s default reaches people “in, or interested in” your area. That second half means a searcher on the other side of the country can trigger your ad just for looking up your town. You pay for a click that can never become a job.
Switch to presence targeting, so you only pay for people actually in the suburbs you serve. Then cut the fringe suburbs where the drive time eats your margin. This one change often trims real waste on its own. The location targeting guide covers the exact settings.
How to run the full diagnosis (in order)
Do not fix at random. Run the checks in this order and stop at the first real leak you find, because the early ones distort everything below them.
If you do not run the account yourself, these seven are the questions to put to whoever does. Ask for them in this order. Anyone doing the job properly will have been down this ladder already and can tell you which rung you are stuck on. If nobody can, that is usually your answer, and it is the point where paying someone who runs this diagnosis for a living starts to make sense.
One discipline holds it together. Do not change the bid strategy just to feel busy. Give a new campaign or keyword time to gather data, then act on a clear missed threshold. If you expected a booked job by 50 clicks and there is still nothing by 80, that is the signal to change something. Not before.
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Why are my Google Ads getting no impressions? Usually a settings issue, not a broken platform. Common causes: the campaign is paused, the ad was disapproved, billing failed, the daily budget is capped, the bid is too low to enter the auction, or the targeting is too narrow. Check the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool first. It names the reason.
Why are my Google Ads getting clicks but not converting? The leak is past the click. Most often the landing page does not match the search, so people leave. Sometimes the wrong searches are triggering your ad, and sometimes the calls come in but go unanswered. Work through the diagnosis above: page, then keywords, then whether the phone is being answered.
How do I fix Google Ads fast? Fix in order of leak size. Confirm the ads show, then check that conversion tracking counts only real leads, then read the search terms report and add negatives. Those three catch most of the waste in an afternoon. The slower wins are the landing page and your response speed.
Is it Google Ads, or is it my account? Almost always your account. Platform-wide outages are rare and show on the Google Ads Status Dashboard. If the dashboard is clear, the problem is a fixable leak in your settings, tracking, or follow-up, not Google.
