Why aren't my Google Ads working?
Short answer: when a trade tells us their Google Ads “don't work”, it is almost always one of three things, and only one of them is actually the ad. Either the campaign is not really running, or the budget is too small to compete, or, most often, the clicks are coming through fine and the website is quietly losing them before the phone rings.
Every other guide on this search walks you through Google's settings menu and stops there. That is the easy half. The hard truth, the one that costs trades the most money, is that your ads are often working and you either cannot see it or the website is wasting it. Here is the whole thing, in order, with real UK numbers.
Start here
First, is it even switched on?
Before you touch anything, check the ad is actually eligible to run. Google puts a status against every campaign, ad and keyword, and it tells you the answer plainly if you know where to look. The most common ones that quietly stop a trade's ads:
| Status you might see | What it really means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Limited by budget | There is more traffic than your budget can pay for, so ads are being rationed. | Raise the budget or tighten to fewer, cheaper keywords. |
| Eligible (limited): low ad rank | Allowed to run, but your bid or quality is too low to win many auctions. | Improve relevance and bid; match the ad to the search. |
| Under review | A new or edited ad is waiting on Google, usually about a working day. | Wait it out; submit ads a couple of days before you need them. |
| Disapproved | The ad broke a policy and will not run at all. | Read the reason, fix the wording, resubmit. |
| Not eligible: low search volume | A keyword is searched too rarely for Google to run it. | Broaden the term or switch it to phrase match. |
| Paused | Something in the chain is switched off, at campaign, ad group, ad or keyword level. | Check every level is enabled, not the campaign alone. |
Stop doing this
Do not check whether your ads are running by Googling yourself.
Google personalises your results, knows where you are, and searching over and over without clicking teaches it to hide the ad from you, all while running up impressions that wreck your own figures. Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool inside Google Ads instead. It tells you whether the ad can show for a given search, and if not, exactly why.
The maths nobody does
Your budget might just be too small to compete.
Every other guide says “increase your budget” and leaves it there. Here is the actual arithmetic, because for a lot of trades the ads are not broken, the sum simply does not add up. What a click costs swings hard by trade and area. These are real UK figures, not the dollars every other page quotes:
| Trade term | Typical UK cost per click |
|---|---|
| General trade keywords | around £2 to £8 |
| Electrician | roughly £2.50 to £8 |
| Roofer, landscaper | around £3 to £6 |
| Emergency plumber | £8 to £15, past £30 for "near me" in a city |
Now put a small budget against that. At £10 a click on emergency plumbing, a £10 a day budget buys you one click a day. One. On a bad day that click is a wrong number or a tyre-kicker and your whole day's advertising is gone. Google cannot learn from one click a day, and you cannot build a diary on it either. That is not a broken campaign, it is arithmetic.
The rule of thumb
Your daily budget wants to buy you at least a handful of clicks, not one.
On a dear trade term that means most trades starting out need £600 to £1,000 a month behind a single town before it can really compete. If you cannot stretch to that, do not spread it thinner, narrow it: one service, one town, the cheapest buyer-ready keywords. We break the numbers down in how much you should spend on Google Ads.
The setup mistake
One campaign for everything spreads it too thin.
The classic trade setup: one campaign covering plumbing, heating, bathrooms and drains, aimed at a 30-mile radius, on a tenner a day. It feels efficient. It is the opposite. That handful of pounds gets split across dozens of different searches and a huge area, so nothing gets enough money behind it to win anywhere. Every one of those jobs is a separate auction, and you are turning up to all of them with loose change.
The fix is to stop trying to be everywhere. Pick the one or two jobs that actually pay, the town you actually want to work in, and the searches from people ready to book, not browsers and DIYers. Concentrate the budget so it can win a smaller fight, then widen out once it is paying. A tight, focused campaign on a small budget beats a sprawling one every time.
The one that costs the most
The clicks are coming. The phone isn't.
This is the big one, and it is the reason most trades wrongly blame the ad. The click is doing its job: someone searched, saw you, and came through. Then nothing happens. The ad got them to the door; the website did not let them in. An ad can only ever get someone to your website. What happens next is on the website, and this is where the money leaks away:
- The click lands on a general homepage. Someone searched “emergency electrician Leicester” and got dropped on a homepage listing every service you offer. They have to go hunting for the thing they came for. A page built for that exact job, answering that exact search, turns far more of those clicks into calls.
- The phone number is not the first thing they see. A trade customer wants to tap the number and talk to a human, now. If they have to scroll and squint for it, they hit the back button and ring the next result instead.
- The site is slow on a phone. Nearly every trade search is on a mobile, and often an urgent one. A site that takes an age to load loses people before it even appears, and Google marks you down for it too, which pushes your click price up.
- The only way to reach you is a fiddly form. Nobody standing in a flooded kitchen fills in ten fields. Make calling the obvious, easy thing to do.
None of that is fixed by touching the ad. You can pour more money into perfect ads all day and they will keep leaking out the bottom. This is exactly why we build the website to convert first and run the ads second, and why we wrote what makes a website actually win jobs.
The hidden trap
It might be working and you can't see it.
Here is the one almost nobody tells you, because it takes joining two dots. Trades win work by phone call, not by form. But Google Ads cannot see a phone call unless you set up call tracking, so if your leads come in as calls and you never wired that up, Google reports zero results. You look at “0 conversions” and conclude the ads are dead, when in fact the phone has been ringing the whole time.
It gets worse if you let Google bid automatically. The automated bidding chases conversions, and if it can see none coming in, it decides the campaign is failing and quietly throttles it back. So untracked calls hide your wins and, worse, starve the very campaign that is winning them. It is a doom loop: the phone rings, Google cannot see it, Google turns you down, the phone rings less.
Before you conclude anything
Track the calls, then judge the ads.
Put call tracking in place so every phone lead registers, then look at the numbers. Half the “my ads don't work” cases we see are ads that were working fine, judged blind. You cannot manage what you are not measuring.
Where the budget leaks
You're paying for the wrong clicks.
Sometimes the ads run, the clicks come, and the money still vanishes, because a chunk of it is being spent on people who were never going to hire you. Two things cause most of it.
Broad match with no negatives. Left on broad match, Google shows your ad for loosely related searches you never chose. Check your search terms report and you will see what you actually paid for. For a trade, the usual money-drains are people looking for a job, a bargain or a DIY fix, not a tradesman to hire. Add these as negative keywords so you stop paying for them:
A trade's starter negative keyword list
jobs · careers · salary · apprenticeship · courses · training · how to · DIY · free · cheap · wholesale · supplies · parts · screwfix · toolstation · B&Q · rent · hire (tool hire)
Performance Max or Smart campaigns on a local budget. These are what Google nudges beginners into, and they are the wrong tool for a small local trade. They scatter your budget across the whole of Google, images and app placements included, often well outside your area, and they need far more conversion data than a trade ever feeds them to work properly. For a trade, a plain Search campaign, tightly targeted to your patch, keeps you in control of where the money goes.
They were running yesterday
When ads that worked suddenly stop.
If your ads were bringing in work and have gone quiet, it is rarely a mystery and rarely Google's fault. Run down this list, top to bottom, and you will almost always find it in a couple of minutes.
Check billing first
A declined card or a hit spending cap stops delivery instantly and silently. This is the single most common cause of a sudden stop.
Look for a fresh disapproval
An ad can pick up a policy disapproval on a routine re-review overnight. One disapproved ad in a small account can quiet the lot.
Read the change history
It logs every change and who made it. More often than you would think, someone paused a campaign or edited a keyword and forgot.
Check your conversion tracking still fires
If a website change broke the tracking tag, automated bidding sees no results and throttles the campaign back on its own.
Consider the outside world
A competitor turning their budget up, or a seasonal swing like the autumn heating rush, can raise click prices enough to price a small budget out.
Where we come in
What we'd do for you.
We build websites that turn clicks into phone calls and we run the Google Ads that send the clicks, in that order, because an ad landing on a website that leaks is money set on fire. If your ads are not working, we will tell you straight whether it is the budget, the setup, the tracking or the website, rather than just turning the spend up and hoping.
If you are still deciding whether ads are the right move at all, start with are Google Ads worth it, and if you are weighing them against other channels, Google Ads vs Facebook Ads lays out which wins you work.
Straight answers
Questions trades actually ask.
- Why are my Google Ads suddenly not working?
- When ads that were running just stop, it is almost never Google breaking. Run down the short list: a card that got declined or a spending cap you hit (delivery stops the moment the money does), an ad that picked up a policy disapproval overnight, someone pausing the campaign by accident, your conversion tracking coming loose so the bidding starts starving itself, or a bigger competitor turning their budget up and outbidding you. Check the account status and the change history first, in that order, and you will usually find it in a couple of minutes.
- Why can't I see my own ads when I search on Google?
- Because your own searches are the worst way to check. Google personalises what you see, it knows roughly where you are, and searching repeatedly without ever clicking teaches it to stop showing you the ad. Worse, every search you do racks up an impression with no click, which drags your own numbers down. Never judge whether ads are running by Googling yourself. Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool inside Google Ads instead: it shows you exactly whether your ad is eligible to appear for a given search, and if not, it tells you why.
- Is there a problem with Google Ads itself?
- Almost never. A true platform outage that stops ads serving is rare and short-lived, and it would hit every advertiser at once, not you alone. Nearly every "Google Ads is broken" moment turns out to be account-level: billing, a disapproval, a paused setting, a budget that ran dry, or tracking that stopped reporting. The status labels in your account will tell you which one it is. If everything reads "Eligible" and you are still getting nothing, the problem has moved past the ad and onto the website or the tracking.
- How long before Google Ads start working?
- Give a new campaign two to four weeks and somewhere around 50 to 100 clicks before you judge it. Google needs that much data to work out who to show your ads to and when, and the automated bidding has a learning period where the numbers bounce about. Turning everything off after three days, or fiddling with the budget and keywords every morning, resets that learning and keeps you stuck at the start. Set it up properly, leave it be, and read it after a month of real traffic.
- What does "Limited by budget" mean?
- It means there is more traffic available than your daily budget can pay for, so Google is deliberately holding your ads back to make the money last. Your ad is eligible and could be showing far more, but it is being rationed. On a dear trade term this is the usual state of a small budget: at around £10 a click, a £10 a day budget buys you one click, and Google spreads that thinly rather than blowing it by 9am. The fix is either a bigger budget on fewer, tighter keywords, or cheaper, more specific terms.
- My ads get clicks but nobody calls. Why?
- This is the most common one, and it is not the ad. The click is doing its job, getting someone to your website; the website is not doing its job, turning them into a phone call. Usually the click lands on a general homepage instead of a page built for the exact job they searched, the phone number is not the first thing they see, the site is slow to load on a phone, or the only way to get in touch is a fiddly form nobody fills in on a job site. Fix where the click lands and what it lands on, and the same ads start ringing the phone.
- Is £10 a day enough for Google Ads?
- On a cheap term, maybe. On a dear one, no. At £2 a click, £10 a day is five clicks, which is thin but workable. On "emergency plumber" at £10 or more a click, £10 a day is a single click and the bidding never gets enough data to improve. Under about £30 a day on a competitive trade term you are paying to sit permanently "Limited by budget" without really competing. Most trades starting out want £600 to £1,000 a month in one town to give it a fair go. There is more on the numbers in our guide to how much to spend.
- Why do my ads say "Eligible" but still don't show much?
- Eligible means allowed to run, not guaranteed to win. Every search is an auction, and if your bid is below what the top slots are going for, or your Quality Score is low because the ad and the website do not match the search well, you sit in the auction and rarely come out on top. You will often see it spelled out as "Eligible (limited): rarely showing due to low ad rank" or "low Quality Score". The fix is relevance: tighter keywords, ad copy that matches the search, and a website page that matches the ad.
Paying for ads that aren't paying you back?
Tell us a bit about your business and we'll tell you straight where it is going wrong, the budget, the setup, the tracking or the website. Got a question first? Just message us.