When a business owner tells us their Google Ads are not profitable, the first thing we do is not look at the ads. That surprises people. They expect us to pull apart their keywords and rewrite their headlines. Sometimes that is the fix. Usually it is not.
The truth is that most "Google Ads is not working" cases are something else entirely, wearing an ads costume. The clicks are fine. The problem sits either side of them, in the tracking that measures success or the page that is supposed to earn it. If you jump straight to bids and match types, you are treating a symptom and leaving the disease alone.
Here is the diagnostic order we actually work through. Follow it top to bottom, because a problem near the top makes everything below it impossible to judge.
Start with tracking, because everything depends on it
Before you decide an account is unprofitable, you have to be sure you are measuring the right thing. This is where a shocking number of accounts fall over.
Common tracking faults we find:
- Conversions counting page views or button clicks rather than genuine enquiries or sales.
- The same lead counted three or four times because the thank-you page can be refreshed.
- Phone calls, the main way many local businesses get work, not tracked at all.
- Purchase values not passed through, so the account optimises for cheap conversions instead of valuable ones.
If your tracking is wrong, every other number is fiction. An account that looks like a disaster can be quietly profitable once the phone calls are counted. An account that looks fine can be burning money on junk. Fix this first, always.
Does the landing page keep the ad's promise
Assume tracking is honest. The next question is whether the page delivers what the ad said it would.
Google Ads has one job: to get a relevant person to click. After that, the landing page has to do the selling, and this is where most of the money leaks away. Someone searches "emergency plumber Norwich", clicks an ad that says exactly that, and lands on a generic homepage with no phone number above the fold and no mention of Norwich or emergencies. The click was perfect. The page threw it away.
Check for a clean match between the search, the ad and the page. The page should name the thing the person searched for, answer the obvious next question, and make the action obvious. If the ad promises a free quote, the free quote should be the first thing they see, not buried under an "about us" story.
A rough rule from years of doing this: if your landing page converts under two in a hundred visitors for a clear commercial search, the page is the problem, not the traffic.
Is the offer actually competitive
This one is uncomfortable because it is not really a marketing question. It is a business question.
Your ad can be sharp and your page can be tidy, and you can still lose because the person clicked three other ads as well and one of them was better. Cheaper, faster, more reassuring, longer guarantee, clearer pricing. If four firms all say "quality service, free quote, call today", the customer picks more or less at random, and often on price.
Before blaming the campaign, look at what a searcher sees when they compare you to the competition on the same day. If your offer is genuinely ordinary, no amount of bid tuning rescues it. Sharpen the offer and the same budget suddenly works harder.
Only now, look at keywords and bids
Notice how far down the list this is. Once tracking is trustworthy, the page keeps its promise, and the offer stands up, then and only then does it make sense to look at the account itself.
At this stage the usual suspects are worth checking. Broad match hoovering up irrelevant searches. No negative keywords, so you pay for "free", "jobs" and "DIY". Budget spread so thin across so many keywords that nothing gets enough data to learn. These are real problems and they cost real money, but they are the last 20 per cent, not the first thing to reach for.
The full-funnel view
The reason we work in this order is simple. A click-focused agency is paid to manage clicks, so clicks are what they look at. Report the click-through rate, tweak the bids, send the invoice. If the money problem lives in the tracking or the page or the offer, that agency will happily optimise a broken funnel forever, and the numbers will keep disappointing you.
We take the whole funnel as our problem, from the search all the way to the sale, because that is the only place the profit or the loss is actually decided. Charging a fixed fee rather than a percentage of spend helps here: we have no reason to want you spending more, only to want the account working.
If your Google Ads feel like they should be paying off and they are not, this is the sequence to run before you touch a single bid. If you would like a second pair of eyes on where yours is leaking, our PPC work starts with exactly this kind of audit.