If your Google Ads campaign isn’t generating leads or conversions are way lower than expected, there’s ways to solve the problem.
There’s a systematic way to troubleshoot your campaign and figure out exactly where the problem is.
Today, I’m going to walk you through the exact framework I use whenever I need to troubleshoot campaigns that aren’t performing. This process will help you identify why conversions aren’t coming through and what you can do to fix it.
If you want to watch the video going over this, you can watch the video above about my Google Ads campaign troubleshooting process, or you can read on below.
Let’s get into the content.
Step 1: Check The “Stupid Stuff” First
Before you start diving deep into campaign settings and optimization, you need to check the obvious things first.
I call this “checking the stupid stuff” because these are simple issues that can break your entire campaign, but they’re easy to overlook.
I’ve already made these types of mistakes in the past, so learn from my mistakes and apply them to your campaign.
Are Your Landing Pages Actually Working?
This sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this is the problem.
Go into your Google Ads account → Ads → Click on your ad
This will take you to wherever your traffic is being sent.
Ask yourself:
- Does the page load?
- Are you sending traffic to the right page?
- Does it work on mobile?
- How long does it take to load?
The loading speed issue is huge.
If your landing page takes 5+ seconds to load, people will hit the back button and return to Google before your page even appears.
They’re not going to wait around.
Test your page on your phone. Time how long it takes to load. If it’s slow, that could be your entire problem right there.
Also, when you test your page on a phone, make sure the content is displaying properly.
Sometimes, parts of the page could mess up and make the content display improperly. For example, the call button could get messed up or something, and that could tank your conversion rates.
Is Your Conversion Tracking Working?
This is another big one that can make you think you’re not getting leads when you actually are.
Check your conversion tracking setup:
- Is it installed correctly on your landing pages?
- Is it installed on your thank you page for form submissions?
- Is the Google Tag in the head section of your pages?
- Are the event snippets in the right places?
This is why I always recommend setting up call tracking software like Call Rail.
If your Google Ads conversion tracking breaks, but you’re still seeing phone calls coming through in Call Rail, you know the problem is your tracking and not your campaign.
Without call tracking, you might think you’re getting zero leads when really your tracking just isn’t working.
Is It A Holiday Or Off Season?
Sometimes the problem has nothing to do with your campaign at all.
For example, I was looking at one of my campaigns recently. Memorial Day weekend was coming up, and the week leading up to it was slow. The weekend itself was dead. Monday after the holiday? One lead all day despite good traffic.
That’s not a campaign problem. That’s a holiday weekend problem.
Other examples:
- Auto detailing in December when it’s 35 degrees outside
- Pool service in the middle of winter
- Landscaping during a snowstorm
- Any service-based business during major holidays
Human behavior impacts your campaigns.
People don’t want to get their car detailed when it’s freezing. They’re not thinking about pool maintenance in January. They’re not focused on hiring services during the holidays.
Before you change anything in your campaign, consider:
- Is it a holiday or holiday weekend?
- Is it your industry’s off-season?
- Is there unusual weather?
- Is there anything going on with the economy affecting demand?
These external factors can tank your performance temporarily, and there’s nothing you can do about it except wait it out.
The Broken Form
Here’s a quick real story from a campaign I had that wasn’t working.
I once had a campaign where conversion rates suddenly dropped.
I checked everything in the campaign. Nothing had changed. Traffic looked good. Ads were performing well.
The problem? The contact form on the landing page had broken. It wasn’t submitting properly.
The forms fields required specific formatting for emails. Meaning that you had to put an actual email@domain.com email address or it wouldn’t work.
In my hasty stupidity setting up the form, I set BOTH the phone number and email form fields to the email formatting.
Meaning, that when people were trying to put in their phone numbers, the form wouldn’t work because it was looking for an email address in the phone number form field.
Long story short… people weren’t able to submit the form, and it was no wonder why my conversion rate was 10% lower than where it would be normally.
That’s why you check the “stupid stuff” first. Sometimes it’s something completely outside your campaign settings.
Step 2: The Four Pillars Of Lead Generation
If you’ve checked the obvious things and everything is working, now it’s time to look at the four core elements that every successful Google Ads campaign needs.
I break down lead generation into four pillars. If any one of these is broken, your campaign won’t generate leads.
Let’s go through each one.
Pillar #1: Get The Right Search Traffic
Up front, if the traffic coming into your campaign is irrelevant, it doesn’t matter what else you do further down the line on your campaign.
You can write the best ads and send that traffic to the best landing pages, but if you just don’t have the right traffic it’s either not going to convert or you’re going to get irrelevant leads.
Before you check any other part of your Google Ads funnel, this is the first thing you want to look into.
Addressing this is all about your keywords and negative keywords.
What you’re looking for:
High-intent keywords: Are you bidding on keywords that show buying intent?
Good examples:
- “window tinting near me”
- “window tint shop near me”
- “car window tinting near me”
Bad examples:
- Just “tinting” (too broad)
- “window tint film” (product search)
- “how to tint windows” (DIY search)
Correct match types: Are your keywords wrapped in phrase match or exact match?
If you see keywords with no quotes or brackets, you’re running broad match. That’s a problem.
You want to see:
- “keyword” (phrase match)
- [keyword] (exact match)
Not:
- keyword (broad match)
Check your Search Terms Report:
Go to Insights and Reports → Search Terms
This shows you every actual search your ads appeared for.
Look for irrelevant searches. If you’re seeing traffic that has nothing to do with what you offer, that’s your first problem.
You can’t convert irrelevant traffic no matter how good your landing page is.
What to do:
- Add irrelevant searches as negative keywords
- Make sure you’re bidding on high-intent keywords only
- Use phrase or exact match, never broad match
Pillar #2: Make Sure Your Ads are Getting Clicked On
This part of the process is pretty straightforward, but if your ads aren’t getting clicked, you’re not getting traffic.
The main things you need to make sure of here is that your ads are relevant to the traffic that you’re bringing in.
On top of that, you want to make sure that your ads are relevant to the landing page that you’re sending the traffic to (more on relevance in just a second).
Check your click-through rate (CTR):
A good CTR for search campaigns is typically 5-7% or higher.
If you’re getting 10-12%, you’re doing great.
If you’re below 5%, your ads might not be relevant or compelling enough.
How to improve CTR:
Fill out ALL headline slots in your responsive search ads (all 15).
Make sure your ads are relevant to what people are searching.
If someone searches “window tinting near me” and your ad is generic about “auto services,” they’re not clicking.
Your ad needs to specifically mention window tinting.
The good news:
In my experience, ads are rarely the main problem preventing lead generation.
As long as your ads are relevant to what people are searching, you should get decent click-through rates.
The bigger issues are usually traffic quality or landing page problems.
Pillar #3: Send Traffic To A Well Optimized Landing Page
This is the most important pillar.
The reason for that is – 80% of your success or failure comes down to your landing page.
You can do everything else on your campaign perfectly… use the right keywords, great ads, high CTR, but if you’re sending traffic to a poorly designed page, you’re not going to be generating leads.
The most common mistake:
Sending traffic to the homepage of your website.
Your homepage has navigation, links to other pages, blog posts, about pages and all kinds of distractions.
Every distraction is an opportunity for someone to leave without converting.
Instead what you need is a dedicated landing page (or landing pages) designed specifically to convert visitors into leads.
Requirements for a good landing page:
- No navigation menu
- Clear headline about what you do
- Simple, obvious call to action (phone number and/or form)
- Optimized for mobile
- Loads in under 3 seconds
- Reviews and trust signals
- Real photos (not stock images)
Here’s some math going into why landing pages are important:
Typical website conversion rate: 10% Good landing page conversion rate: 20%+
If you’re spending $1,000 on ads and getting 100 clicks:
Website at 10% = 10 leads at $100/lead Landing page at 20% = 20 leads at $50/lead
Same traffic. Same ad spend. Double the leads. Half the cost per lead.
That’s the power of landing pages.
If your campaign isn’t generating leads and you’re not using landing pages, that’s probably your entire problem.
Pillar #4: Everything Must Be Relevant
This ties everything together, and I would argue is equally as important as landing pages.
Every step of the process must be relevant to what the person searched for.
If there’s a break in the relevance to the searcher at any point, that can affect key areas of your campaign.
From the number of people clicking on your ads, to the number of people converting on your landing page, if things aren’t relevant all of the way through then it could all be affected.
Here’s what relevance looks like:
Someone searches → Sees relevant ad → Clicks → Lands on relevant page → Converts
If there’s a disconnect anywhere in that chain, conversions drop off.
Example of bad relevance:
Search: “window tinting near me”
Ad: Talks about window tinting ✓
Landing page: Talks about vinyl wraps ✗
The landing page isn’t relevant to what they searched for. They’ll leave.
Example of good relevance:
Search: “window tinting near me”
Ad: “Window Tinting – Get A Free Quote”
Landing page: Specifically about window tinting services
Everything aligns. Much higher chance of conversion.
How to structure for relevance:
Organize your campaigns into themed ad groups:
- Window Tinting ad group (with window tinting keywords and ads)
- PPF ad group (with paint protection film keywords and ads)
- Vinyl Wrap ad group (with vinyl wrap keywords and ads)
Each ad group has keywords specific to that theme, ads specific to that theme, and sends traffic to pages relevant to that theme.
Don’t dump all your keywords in one ad group with generic ads.
Bonus: Hidden Budget Drains
Beyond the four main pillars, there are a few specific things that can quietly waste your budget without you realizing it.
Again, these are more mistakes that I’ve dealt with in the past, so learn from my mistakes and save yourself the money ahead of time.
#1 Location Asset Enabled
The location asset lets you pay to have your Google Maps listing show up as a sponsored result.
Sounds great, right? More visibility?
In many cases this can work, but I’ve had some industries and markets where it just didn’t work as well as I would have liked.
I’ve had instances where the location asset was generating traffic, people were clicking on the sponsored listing, but very few (if any) were actually converting into leads.
Let me show you what I mean.
I launched a campaign for a client back in 2023. Everything was set up correctly. Landing pages were working. But I had 67 clicks and zero conversions.
I was confused. What was going on?
I dug into the data and found the problem:
Go to your campaign → Segment → Click Type
When you enable the location asset, you can see where clicks are coming from:
- Headline clicks (good—goes to landing page)
- Get location details (bad—just opens Google Maps listing)
- Driving directions (bad—charged for someone getting directions)
The issue:
When someone clicks “get location details” or “driving directions,” you get charged a click.
But that person never goes to your landing page. They’re just looking at your Google Business Profile.
In that case, people were clicking on the business profile, clicking directions, etc but just not converting into leads.
That meant that we were pretty much just wasting budget on the campaign.
After I removed the location asset from the campaign:
- 188 headline clicks (going to landing page)
- Converting at $28 per lead
- Everything working perfectly
Before removing it, the location asset clicks were just bleeding budget with no trackable results.
What I do now:
If I enable a location asset, I monitor those numbers very closely.
Google gives you a default conversion action for people who call from the Google Maps listing that you can track in Google Ads.
Also, just to be safe, I get conversion tracking set up on the client’s website to try to track anybody who goes to the website.
As long as you’re keeping an eye on it, it’s possible to get a handful more leads from this asset every month, but it’s also possible that I could waste budget.
#2 Search Partners Or Display Network Enabled
Both of these settings can be a waste of your budget as well, so make sure they’re both turned off.
Go to your campaign Settings → Networks
Make sure both of these are unchecked:
- Search Partners
- Display Network
Search Partners: Used to be decent, but over the past few years the traffic quality has tanked.
Google shows your ads on random “search partner” websites, and you get a lot of low-quality traffic, people looking for jobs, completely irrelevant clicks.
There’s not a lot of transparency from Google about where those ads show up, and when you have no idea where the traffic is coming from you won’t have any context on the quality of the traffic.
Display Network: Shows your ads as banner ads on random websites across the internet.
Unless you’re specifically running a display campaign with proper targeting, this is just going to waste money.
I never run campaigns with either of these enabled anymore.
Both are unchecked on all my campaigns.
#3 Device, Audience, Location, Or Schedule Issues
Sometimes one specific segment is bleeding your budget.
These can be things like a device not converting well, a specific audience (age range, gender, etc) not working well, locations not converting well, or days/times of the week that just aren’t driving affordable leads for your business.
Devices: Go to “When and Where Ads Showed” → Devices
Are desktop computers converting at half the rate of mobile?
If so, exclude desktop or decrease desktop bids significantly.
Audiences: Go to “Audiences, keywords, and content” → Audiences → Demographics
Check age ranges. Is 18-24 wasting money? Exclude it.
Check household income. Is lower 50% not converting? Exclude it.
Check gender if relevant to your business.
Locations: Some zip codes or cities might be performing terribly.
If one location has double the cost per lead of others, consider excluding it.
Ad Schedule: This is a big one.
Here’s an example from a pool service client of mine where we identified a ton of wasted spend based on the ad schedule:
- Saturday: Best day, great performance
- Sunday: Good performance
- Monday: Terrible. Cost per conversion was nearly $700.
I told the client: “We shouldn’t run ads on Monday.”
Just by trimming out Monday, we reduced overall cost per lead and generated more leads with the same budget.
How to check: Go to “Where and when ads showed” → Ad schedule
Look for days or times that are consistently underperforming.
Final Thoughts
Google Ads campaigns not generating leads is frustrating, but it’s rarely a mystery.
There’s always a reason, and it’s usually something in this framework.
Most often, it comes down to:
- Poor traffic quality (wrong keywords, broad match)
- Sending traffic to a website instead of a landing page
- Lack of relevance through the funnel
Fix these core issues first before you worry about advanced optimization.
Get the foundation right, and the leads will come.
Need Help Troubleshooting Your Campaign?
If you’re a business owner struggling with a Google Ads campaign that isn’t generating leads, I can help.
There’s a link below where you can apply for a free consultation. I’ll review your application personally and if I can help, I’ll reach out to schedule a call.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this framework helps you fix your campaign and start generating leads.
Want to check out more Google Ads content? Here’s a post we put together on 5 tips for running tree service Google Ads campaigns.
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