Google Ads spending with no leads: what's wrong

Open your search terms report and read what people actually typed. It is free, it is inside your account, and it is where most wasted ad spend becomes obvious. Businesses run ads for months without ever looking at it.

The three reasons ads produce nothing

Wrong searches. Your ads appear for phrases you never intended, so you pay for clicks from people who were never going to buy.

Wrong landing page. The clicks are relevant but the page they land on does not convert them.

Leads not counted. Ads are working, calls are coming in, nothing is tracking them, and you conclude it failed.

Work through them in that order, because the first is the most common and the cheapest to fix.

Reading the search terms report

If the searches are right but nobody enquires

Now the problem is the page, and there is one dominant cause.

The ad points at the homepage. Someone searching “emergency boiler repair Leeds” clicks an ad and lands on a general homepage listing six services with a menu to navigate. They leave. Send them to a boiler repair page with a phone number at the top and nothing else competing for attention.

The page does not match the ad. If the ad says “from £85” the page had better say that too. Mismatch destroys trust instantly.

No price, no proof, no obvious next step. Same conversion problems as any page, except here you are paying for every visitor who bounces. My website gets no enquiries covers the page side.

Slow on mobile. You are paying for clicks that leave before the page renders. Ads punish a slow site harder than organic traffic does, because every abandoned load is money.

If leads might be arriving uncounted

This one causes businesses to switch off profitable campaigns.

If your customers ring rather than fill in forms, and calls are not tracked, your ads report will show almost no conversions while the phone rings. Set up call tracking before concluding ads do not work.

Also ask new customers how they found you. Low tech, and it catches what tracking misses.

The budget question

A frequent cause of disappointment that is nobody’s fault: the budget is simply too small for the market.

In a competitive category, a click can cost several pounds. At £150 a month with a £5 click cost, you are buying thirty clicks. If one in ten enquires, that is three enquiries a month, and a bad month will produce none.

That is not ads failing. That is a sample too small to judge. Either spend enough to get meaningful volume in your category, or accept that ads are not the right channel for your budget and put the money into local search instead.

When to stop

Ads are worth running when the maths works, and worth stopping when it does not.

Take your monthly spend, count the leads it produced, and work out cost per lead. Then compare that with what a customer is worth. If a lead costs £60 and a customer is worth £2,000 with a one in three conversion rate, keep going. If a lead costs £60 and a customer is worth £90, stop.

That calculation is the entire decision, and it is more useful than any amount of dashboard analysis.

Ads versus doing the free things

Worth saying, because plenty of businesses buy ads while ignoring cheaper options.

Your Google Business Profile is free and for local searches it often produces more enquiries than paid ads do. Reviews are free. Both work while you sleep and neither charges per click.

If your profile is neglected and you have eleven reviews, spending £400 a month on ads is the wrong order. Fix the free things, then decide whether you still need to pay for traffic.

SEO versus paid ads covers the trade-off, and should you run Google Ads yourself covers whether to manage them in house.

Our Premier plan at £199 a month includes ad management, with the spend paid to Google directly by you and set at whatever level you choose. If you want a free look at why your current campaigns are not producing, send us your account details and we will tell you what the search terms report shows.