article · GOOGLE ADS NOT GETTING LEADS

Find Where TheBudget Went.

Ad spend is the one marketing line where a bad setting costs real money every day. These are the seven usual causes, in the order worth checking.

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drop: a quiet phone beside a running meter, standing in for ad s…

01 · why am i spending on google ads and getting no leads

Why Google Ads produces no leads.

Roughly in the order they cost the most money. Any one of these can eat an entire budget on its own.

Broad match with no negatives

Your ads are showing on searches you would never pay for, because nothing has been excluded. Open the search terms report and read what people actually typed. This is the biggest leak in most accounts.

The Search Partners and Display network left on

A search campaign quietly extended onto other sites spends fast and converts poorly for local service businesses. Check the network settings on every campaign, because it is on by default.

Location targeting set to interest rather than presence

The default includes people merely interested in your area, not people in it. For anyone selling locally that is a straight transfer of budget to the wrong country.

Conversions not tracked, or tracking the wrong thing

If a page view counts as a conversion, the system optimises for page views and gets very good at buying them. Calls and submitted forms are conversions. Clicks and visits are not.

The ad and the landing page do not match

The ad promises one service and the page is a homepage listing nine. The click is paid for either way, so the mismatch is charged to you at full price.

Nobody answers the phone

The most expensive failure and the most common. If calls ring out or land in voicemail during business hours, the whole budget is being spent to reach a phone nobody picks up.

The budget is spread across too many campaigns

A small budget split five ways never gathers enough data for any of them to work. One campaign on the service that makes you the most money beats five on everything you do.

02 · how do i check my google ads account

Six checks on your Ads account.

Every one of these is readable by the person paying the bill. The search terms report alone explains most quiet accounts.

Search terms report for the last thirty days. Read the actual queries, not the keywords you bought.

Network settings on every campaign. Search Partners and Display off unless you chose them deliberately.

Location settings. Presence rather than presence or interest, and the radius set to where you actually work.

Conversion actions. Confirm what is counted, and that a call and a form each register once.

Call the number in your own ad, from a phone that is not yours, during business hours.

Click your own ad on a phone and time how long the landing page takes to become usable.

03 · what is a good cost per lead

What a good cost per lead is.

Take what a closed customer is worth to you over the life of the relationship, then the share of leads you actually close. Those two tell you what a lead can cost before the spend stops making sense.

Google's own top of page bid estimates in some professional service categories in this market reach well past forty dollars for a single click, and far beyond that on the most contested legal terms. In categories like those, a small budget with no negatives attached is gone before lunch.

Which is why the order matters. Tighten what you are showing on, make the phone get answered, then add budget. Adding budget first only buys the existing problem at a larger scale.

04 · should i run google ads or do seo

Google Ads versus SEO.

Most owners in The Valley end up on the third row, and the honest reason is timing rather than preference. Ads answer this month. Search answers next year.

Google Ads versus SEO.
option	What it gets you	What goes wrong
Google Ads only	Calls this week, and a volume dial you can turn	It stops the day you stop paying, and the cost per lead climbs as competitors bid
Search work only	Traffic that keeps arriving after the work is done	It takes months to build, so it does nothing about a slow quarter happening now
Both, ads first	Immediate volume while the earned side compounds underneath it	It costs two lines instead of one, and both need somebody actually working them
Neither, referrals only	The lowest cost per customer you will ever have	It has no volume dial. When you need more work, there is nothing to turn up

05 · common questions about google ads

Google Ads questions.

How much should I pay for Google Ads management?

I charge $1,000 a month for the Paid Ads line, which covers Google and Meta together, written, launched and pruned every week. Your ad budget is separate, it goes straight to Google, and I take no percentage of it. Percentage of spend pricing rewards your vendor for spending more. Two services together are $1,799 and three are $2,499. No setup fee.

Why did my cost per click go up?

Usually because more competitors are bidding on the same term, or because your ad relevance dropped. It also rises when you broaden a campaign, since the average now includes expensive searches you did not previously appear on.

Is Google Ads worth it for a small business?

It is worth it when a customer is worth several times what a lead costs and somebody answers the phone. If either is not true yet, fix that first, because ads make an unfixed problem more expensive.

How long before Google Ads works?

A well built campaign produces calls in the first week. Getting the cost per lead down takes a month or two of pruning, because the account needs enough data before the pruning has anything to act on.

Can I run Google Ads myself?

Yes, and the checks in this article are most of the discipline. The part that takes years is knowing which searches to refuse to appear on.

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What the audit turns up.

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