Google Ads Not Converting? Clicks Are Arriving, Leads Are Not

Step 1. Prove it is actually not converting

Before you touch a bid, a budget or a keyword, confirm the account can see a conversion at all. Google Ads only knows what you have told it, and a surprising number of accounts are reporting zero conversions while enquiries land in the inbox every week. The owner is judging the campaign on a feeling about how busy the phone has been, and Google is optimising against a signal that does not exist. Both of those are expensive.

Open the conversions screen in the account and read the status column, not the totals. “Unverified”, “Inactive” or “No recent conversions” beside your main action tells you the tag never fired. The usual culprits are a thank-you page that was never tagged, a form that submits without changing the page address so a destination-based conversion can never trigger, a GA4 import that was brought in but never set as a primary action, or a call conversion counting only calls over a length nobody ever set properly.

Then do the check that settles it. Count the genuine enquiries you received in the last 30 days from the inbox and the call log, and compare that with what the account claims. If the account says 0 and you can count 11, your ads are working and your measurement is broken. That is a good outcome and it costs nothing to fix. If both numbers really are near zero, keep reading.

Step 2. The landing page does not answer the search

This is the cause more often than anything else on this page. Someone searches for a specific job, clicks an ad that promises exactly that, and lands on a homepage built to speak to everyone at once. Now they have to hunt. Most of them will not, because the next result in the search is one tap away and there is no cost to leaving.

The fix is unglamorous: one page per service you advertise, and the headline on that page should echo the words the person typed. If the campaign is bidding on gutter replacement, the page they land on says gutter replacement at the top, prices or a process further down, proof under that, and a way to make contact within reach the whole way. No navigation inviting them to wander into your blog.

Here is the evidence that this is the lever. For a South Australian roofing account we manage, which is an interstate client and not a Perth one, we built a dedicated page for each advertised service and pointed the matching campaign straight at it. Over October 2025 to July 2026, at around $230 a day, the roof replacement page converts at 31.13% at $75.79 per enquiry and the gutter replacement page at 30.00% at $55.31. A conversion there is a tracked enquiry, meaning a call, a form submission or a phone-link tap, never a booked job. Nothing exotic produced those rates. The page said the same thing the search did.

Step 3. Broad match is buying searches you never wanted

Broad match no longer means “close variants of your keyword”. It now reads intent, and left unsupervised it will happily buy clicks from people researching how to do the job themselves, students, job hunters, competitors checking your ad, and searches that share a word with your keyword and nothing else. Those clicks convert at close to nothing, which is exactly the symptom you are looking at.

Pull the search terms report for the last 30 or 90 days and sort by cost, highest first. Read the top 50 rows. You are not looking for a subtle pattern, you are looking for the searches that make you wince. If a meaningful share of your spend went to searches you would never have bought on purpose, that is your answer, and no amount of bid tuning fixes it. Move the money to phrase or exact match on the terms that actually describe what you sell.

Step 4. There is no negative keyword list

This is the other half of the same job, and plenty of accounts have never had one built. Every account needs a standing negative list covering the obvious money-burners: free, cheap, DIY, how to, jobs, careers, salary, course, training, wholesale, second hand, and the names of any brand or service you do not actually offer. Add the suburbs and towns you will not travel to.

Two practical notes. Negatives added at the ad group level only apply to that ad group, so build them as a shared negative list applied across the account or you will do the work 5 times. And check your match types on negatives too, because a broad negative behaves differently to a phrase one and can quietly block more than you intended.

Step 5. The phone number is not tappable on a mobile

Most local service searches happen on a phone, and for trades and urgent services the enquiry is a call, not a form. If your number sits on the page as plain text, or worse is baked into an image or a header graphic, a mobile visitor has to memorise it, leave your site and dial manually. A good share of them will not bother.

The number needs to be a real telephone link so a tap starts the call, it needs to be visible without scrolling, and the tap needs to be counted as a conversion or you are back to Step 1. Turn on call assets in the ads themselves while you are at it, so people can call straight from the search result. Then load your own page on a phone over mobile data rather than office wi-fi and see how long it takes to become usable.

Step 6. The form asks for too much

Every field is another chance to change your mind. A first-contact form needs a name, a phone number or email, and one line about the job. That is it. Address, suburb, preferred date, budget range, how they heard about you and a message with a minimum length all belong in the conversation you have after they get in touch, not before.

Then test the thing properly. Submit it yourself from a phone and from a desktop. Check it actually arrives, and that it does not land in a junk folder nobody opens. Make sure a validation error tells the person what went wrong instead of silently clearing the form, and that a real confirmation appears afterwards so nobody submits 3 times or assumes it failed. A form that quietly fails looks identical, from inside the ads account, to a campaign nobody wanted to respond to.

Step 7. Location targeting is set to “presence or interest”

This one is a default, which is why so many accounts have it. In the location settings there is an option deciding who counts as being in your target area. The default includes people who have merely shown interest in the location, which means someone anywhere in the country reading about Perth can see and click your ad. They were never going to become a customer.

Change it to the presence option, so you only pay for people who are in or regularly in the areas you serve. While you are in there, add exclusions for the areas you will not travel to, and check the radius you set 2 years ago still matches the run you are willing to do today.

The order to work through it

Tracking goes first even though it is not the most common cause, because until it is right you are diagnosing blind and every later change is a guess.

1. Confirm conversions are tracked, and reconcile against your inbox and call log.
2. Check where the ads land, and build a page per advertised service if they do not.
3. Read the search terms report sorted by cost, then fix your match types.
4. Build a shared negative keyword list and apply it account-wide.
5. Make the phone number a tappable link, above the fold, tracked as a conversion.
6. Cut the form back to name, contact and one line.
7. Switch location targeting to presence, and exclude what you will not service.

Change one thing at a time where you can, and give each change enough clicks to say something before you judge it. Stacking 7 changes on a Tuesday and looking at Wednesday tells you nothing at all.

When the honest answer is that you do not need an agency

Sometimes the whole problem is a tag that never fired, and the ads were producing enquiries the entire time. Sometimes it is a phone link and 3 fewer form fields. If that is your situation, do it yourself and keep the management fee. We would rather tell you that than sell you a retainer to solve a problem you already solved.

There are 2 other honest answers worth naming. If your ad budget is small enough that the campaign never gathers enough clicks to learn from, adding a management fee on top makes the maths worse, not better, and waiting until the spend justifies it is the right call. And if almost nobody is searching for what you sell, Google Ads is the wrong channel and no agency can conjure demand that is not there. We check the real search volume in your market before anyone commits, precisely so that conversation happens early rather than 3 months in.

The last one is not an ads problem at all. If enquiries are arriving and nobody returns the call the same day, the campaign is doing its job and the leak is downstream. It is worth ruling out before you blame the account.

If you would rather have someone else look at it

We will go through your account against this list and tell you what we find, including if the finding is that your setup is fine and the problem sits elsewhere. There is no charge for that and no obligation attached to it. If it turns into work, that work is a flat $750+GST per month with your ad spend kept separate, never a percentage of what you spend, and you keep ownership of the ad account either way.

You can see how we run Google Ads accounts for Perth businesses, read the numbers from the accounts we manage or ask for a free review of your account. If you would rather just talk it through, call 1300 095 427 and describe what you are seeing.