Order matters more than cleverness here. Most search accounts that "get no leads" fail at a cheap, boring stage, and people spend weeks adjusting bids when the form has been broken since the last website update. Work through these in sequence.
1. Is the enquiry being recorded?
Submit your own form, tap your own call button, and check whether the account registers it. If not, you cannot tell whether leads are missing or only the counting is. Fix this first. See conversion tracking setup.
2. Are the ads showing, and to whom?
Look at impressions by location and by device. A campaign set to a whole state when you serve one city, or to "interest in" a place and not "presence in" it, spends on people who cannot use your service.
3. What are people actually searching?
Open the search terms report. You will often find that a broad keyword is matching searches for jobs, free advice, or something nearby that you do not sell. Add negative keywords weekly, and separate high-intent terms from research terms.
4. Does the ad match the search?
A search for a specific service should meet an ad that names it. Generic ads wasted on specific searches lose clicks to competitors who say the exact thing.
5. Where does the click land?
If the answer is your homepage, ask whether a visitor with a specific need can see it at once. A page that repeats the promise of the ad and offers one action almost always beats a general page. See landing pages for paid campaigns.
6. What happens after the enquiry?
Call the number from an ad the way a customer would, at an ordinary time. Is it answered? Is the message replied to? Many accounts are blamed for calls that were never picked up.
7. Budget, bids and competition
If a budget is too small for the clicks your keywords cost, the ads run out early in the day and reach only a slice of searches. Check what share of the budget is used and when it ends. This is the point to talk about money, and not before.
Two numbers that reveal a lot
Google reports how much of the available audience you actually reached, and why you missed the rest. Impression share lost to budget means the ads ran out of money before the searches ran out. Impression share lost to rank means your ads were not competitive enough to show. Each points to a different fix: more budget or a narrower focus in the first case, better ads, relevance and bids in the second. Check these before you decide anything is broken.
A one-hour audit
- Ten minutes: submit your own form and check that it is recorded.
- Ten minutes: read the last two weeks of search terms and mark the useless ones.
- Ten minutes: check location, schedule and device settings.
- Ten minutes: read your own ads as a customer would.
- Ten minutes: open the landing page on a phone.
- Ten minutes: ring the number and see who answers.
This catches a surprising share of problems before anyone touches a bid.
Patterns that quietly hold search accounts back
- One campaign holding every service, so the budget goes to the cheapest clicks and not the most valuable ones.
- Location targeting that includes far more than the service area.
- Ads that were written once and never tested.
- Conversion actions that include harmless page views, which teaches the system to chase the wrong thing.
- A landing page that mentions the company but not the service searched for.
Each of these is fixable, and none of them needs a bigger budget.
8. Is Google Ads the right channel?
If very few people search for what you sell, the account will always look quiet, however well it is run. Some offers need to be introduced before they can be searched for. That is the case for social advertising, as in our channel comparison.
If you would like a second pair of eyes, our page on Google Ads management explains what we do and what we do not take on.