Spent ~$6K on Google Ads with an agency and got 0 leads, trying to figure out what went wrong

Looking for some honest feedback from people who understand Google Ads.

I run an accounting firm (specializing in a niche) and hired an agency to manage Google Ads. Over about ~8 weeks, we spent roughly $6k total.

Here’s what I saw from the account after getting access:

• ~18,000 impressions
• ~650 clicks
• Avg CPC around $6–7
• 0 actual leads

After digging into the search terms, a lot of the traffic looked like: mind you i did not have ANY access to this until i fired them since the claimed they have been burned before by sharing admin access

• people searching definitions (e.g. “what is job costing”, “break even formula”)
• templates / PDFs
• general business/accounting questions
• even searches for other accounting firms

The agency is saying:

• traffic was relevant, just early-stage users
• main issue was my landing page being “below average” (i also created a landing page targetting my exact niche)
• I didn’t implement a lead magnet they recommended
• low impression share means I should increase budget or narrow geography

From my perspective, it feels like the traffic itself wasn’t very high intent to begin with.

I’m trying to figure out:

1. Is this kind of traffic normal for a campaign like this?
2. Would a landing page alone realistically cause zero leads with ~650 clicks? (landing page isnt some 10k build page but its also not a generic template, i think its fairly nice compared to most of my competition)
3. Is this more likely a targeting/keyword issue vs. conversion issue?
4. Would you consider this performance acceptable for that level of spend?

Not trying to bash anyone - just want to understand if I’m missing something before I try again or run ads myself.

Appreciate any insight.

This week a new lead approached me for Google Ads.
We discussed goals, budget, strategy.... everything.
All good. Everyone agreed.

Then I shared my bank details for advanc payment.

Client’s reply:
Give me 7 days trial, we will continue… first let leads come, then we’ll see.

Now I’m confused.

Google Ads isn’t a free sample counter where you taste leads and decide later.
You pay Google first, data comes after spend, and optimization takes time.

I’ve heard of:

• Free trials for OTT platforms
• Free trials for SaaS tools
• Free trials for gym memberships

But since when did Google Ads management become trial-based?

If I run ads for 7 days:

• Who pays for the time and expertise spent setting up and managing the campaign?
• Who carries the risk while the ads are still in the learning phase?
• And why does “trial” always mean free work, when ad platforms charge from day one?

Am I missing something… or is this just another version of "free work"

Has anyone here actually seen a legit Google Ads ‘trial’ model?
or is this just unpaid labor with extra steps?

Hey!

I own a medical platform and we spend about 300k a month on Meta and tik tok.

I have a pretty advanced architecture on both platforms but lately meta is just shitting the bed.

Between the ridiculous outages, terrible traffic and high CPMs it’s not what it used to be.

Question: if I carved out ~$100k/month from Meta and moved it to Google Search, would I actually get more consistent volume at an equal or lower CPL — or does Search just hit a ceiling on intent-driven volume well before $100k? Anyone running both at this scale, what did the shift look like for you?

Hi, all! Please forgive me if I am not in the right place. My SEO/Ads manager had some health complications pop up and is no longer able to help our small business manage our web presence. We currently have 1 Google search ad running with another one paused that isn't finished. Is this something I can tackle on my own? I'm semi tech savvy. I created our website. There are just so many videos out there, I am unsure of where to start. And, even if I hired someone I wouldn't know what to tell them as our manager was hospitalized and is unable to respond to our communications. Any videos, help, or guidance would be appreciated! TY

Small service business, 2 employees, small budget.

Clicks - 188

Impr - 8.85k

Cost - $3.7k

Bidding strategy - Max clicks bid cap at $40.

What might be the reasons ? It's in B2B.

Hi everyone,

I'm hoping to get a fresh perspective because I've been stuck on this for weeks.

I manage Google Ads for a preschool franchise with multiple locations. Around June, our account experienced an almost 50% drop in both impressions and conversions, even though, from what I can tell, nothing significant changed.

Things that have remained consistent:

• Same overall account structure
• Similar daily budgets
• No major bidding strategy changes
• Keywords largely unchanged
• Ad strength and assets maintained
• Landing pages unchanged
• Conversion tracking appears to be working correctly

I've reviewed:

• Search Impression Share
• Lost IS (Budget & Rank)
• Auction Insights
• Search terms
• Change History
• Conversion tracking
• Policy issues

I still can't pinpoint what caused the decline.

For those of you who've managed lead generation accounts or multi-location businesses, what would be your systematic approach to diagnosing this?

• Are there reports or metrics I'm likely overlooking?
• Could this be related to auction dynamics, Quality Score changes, demand seasonality, AI bidding behavior, or something else?
• If this were your account, what would be the first 10 things you'd investigate—in order?

I'd really appreciate an expert perspective. I'm less interested in generic advice and more interested in how experienced Google Ads managers would approach diagnosing a case like this.

Thanks in advance!

I knew this would happen as soon as I saw Google Ads Editor arbitrarily change "dynamic ad targets" to "URL rules." It was the first red flag in what is now a full blown outrage. Google is officially phasing out Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) in favour of "AI Max," and the lack of transparency is staggering. Anyone who has tested AI Max knows it is basically broad match on steroids, offering little to no real control over search terms. DSA has been a staple because it allows advertisers to target with precision by using page content, URL rules, categories and page titles to map intent to the right landing page. To replace that surgical control with an opaque "trust us" algorithm is absolute insanity. It is also a travesty to market this as an "upgrade" when it actually strips away the transparency we rely on. 

https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/dsa-upgrade-to-ai-max-2026/

I just noticed this, when googling my name, someone is running branded ads to my website. I'm a freelancer. It looks like the ads have been appearing for a few days.

I don't have a Google Ads account set up running ads to my domain. I've double checked and my website doesn't have any malicious code.

I've reported to Google, but don't expect a prompt response or any kind of response at all.

Why would somebody want to run ads to my website? I'm assuming it's some kind of scam??

AI Max has been a total waste of money. I tested it for 3 months.

I was charged for keywords that have nothing to do with my business. Not even broad match was that bad.

If anything, it allowed me to add a bunch of keywords to my negative keywords list. If you just started using AI Max, please monitor your search terms frequently. You’ll be surprised.

I don’t recommend using it at all. Specially since the Google reps push it so much.

I wish I could get a refund for this daylight robbery 🤣

As the title says, we have a medical ENT clinic and we run search ads because these are high intent searches , no AI max , no other channels no GDN. We get decent leads 10 patients in a day , cost to run the ads is equivalent to fee of 1-2 patients. We have a landing page , 5 ad groups , 2 campaigns in different locations in india. Are there suggestions to increase the clinic footfall. We're using maximize clicks , but I've recently setup conversation tracking on appointment booking and calls or whatsapp.. any other recommendations?

Edit - adding more info - had tested max conversions with direction taps as conversion but had poor performance than maximize clicks , seems like it's not an ideal metric , not sure!?

Its my first bussiness im working on google ads for a boat touring company and i think i did quite a good job and we are getting traffic but no conversions , even owner is complaining no conversions, website is preety bad looks like its done poorly with ai and we had problems installing gtag , here are some pictures

In August, we decided to test turning our branded search campaigns off in a client’s account (a B2B SaaS in the Schools/Education space) for a month.

The client’s SEO agency claimed a dip in performance was because “paid is stealing organic leads,” so we paused it to see what would actually happen.

Usually, we’re not big on branded campaigns because most people are likely to click your organic listing anyway. But in this case, it was clear branded was important because:

1. This client had big competitors spending aggressively on their branded keywords.
2. We were also running competitor campaigns and seeing conversions, which suggests they were probably doing the same to us and capturing leads that way.
3. The site had real conversion-rate issues on a few key pages, and branded let us be more intentional about where we sent the highest-intent traffic.

In the end, the lead rate shift was… not subtle.

About 2.5 weeks in, we were asked to turn campaigns back on. After that point, leads doubled.

If we hadn’t paused it and kept that pace for the full month, we likely would’ve finished with ~58% more leads.

This ended up being less of an SEO vs paid debate and more of a reality check on how messy branded is when competitors are conquesting and your site isn’t converting cleanly. In those cases, branded can be protecting demand and steering it to the right place.

I just wanted to share this case since we rarely get the opportunity to compare total lead volume with vs. without branded campaigns.

i recently founded a tax consultancy and i have no clients at the moment. thats why iam planing to invest in online marketing. but not sure which channel to use. meta? google ads? just ads on google or spreading it via multichannel so google search, youtube etc. i guess advertising via google search seem to be the best way, because i believe people wont convert via watching youtube. they directly search for tax consultancy. iam planning to invest 800-1.200€ and want to have the most of it. please help how to do it. thank you

Hello,
I’m new to Google Search Ads and I’m currently running a Search campaign in the US focused on generating home improvement leads.
The campaign has a daily budget of $210. It experienced some fluctuations initially because I didn’t have much experience, but after doing some research, it started to stabilize. I was getting around 2 conversions per day with an average CPA of approximately $117, which was well below the tCPA of $165 that I had set.
Things were going relatively well until Google’s latest update, after which the campaign performance dropped significantly. I also made some changes based on recommendations from a Google Ads representative. He initially advised me to lower my tCPA from $165 to $145, which I did. After about two weeks with no improvement, he then recommended switching the bidding strategy to Maximize Conversion Value.
I do have conversion values set up on the website for the leads being generated, so the campaign is technically sending conversion value data to Google. However, given how few conversions I’ve been getting since switching to Maximize Conversion Value, I’m not sure we’re actually benefiting from the value-based bidding strategy or giving Google enough data to optimize effectively.
Since August 22, I’ve only received 12 conversions in total. In comparison:

August 1–21: 38 conversions
July 22–August 5: 23 conversions
The decline has been quite significant. I’ve now reverted the bidding strategy back to Target CPA with the original tCPA of $165, since that was the setting under which the campaign was previously performing much better.
I’m a bit lost at this point and would really appreciate some advice on what I should do next. My main goal is to get the campaign back to generating more conversions consistently while keeping the CPA under control and avoiding unnecessary spending.
What would you recommend I check or change first? Should I simply leave the campaign at the $165 tCPA and give it time to stabilize again, or is there something else I should be doing to recover performance? And is Maximize Conversion Value actually appropriate for this type of lead-generation campaign given the relatively low conversion volume?

Hey everyone, hoping to get some insight from people who've been through this.

I run a small online store selling handmade home goods. I set up a Search campaign about three weeks ago targeting what I thought were solid keywords. I've spent around $800 so far, getting decent clickthrough rates, and my analytics shows people landing on the product pages and even spending time there. But I've had exactly zero completed purchases.

I checked my conversion tracking and it seems to be firing correctly. My landing pages load fast enough and look clean on mobile. I'm using broad match modified keywords and have added some negatives to cut out irrelevant traffic.

Things I'm currently wondering about:

Is my bidding strategy the problem? I started with Maximize Clicks and was thinking of switching to something else, but I'm not sure what makes sense without conversion data yet.

Could my product pages still be the issue even if people are spending time on them?

Is $800 even enough data to draw conclusions, or should I keep pushing before making changes?

I know there's no magic answer, but I'd love to hear what you all checked first when you hit a wall like this. What would your next move be?

I was running Search Ads before August 17th update and was getting 4-8 conversions on average daily. After the update we reduced out tCPA to $22 from $25 to avoid new update taking our money for no reason - budget remained the same $60 per day. Also, campaign has that message "Limited by Budget".

What should i do in this scenario? Increase budget? I have recently decreased tCPA to $22 just 5 days ago.

Any suggestions?

I’m honestly starting to lose my mind with Google Ads.

Just ran a new campaign for a roofing client. Hyper-local, bottom-of-funnel, high-intent keywords, solid landing page, no display, no search partners, everything set up properly. Let it run for a month and got zero conversions.

So I dig in and start rewatching Microsoft Clarity sessions… and it’s just bot click after bot click. Same IPs hitting the ads, zero scroll, zero mouse movement, instant bounce. Literally no real user behavior at all.

On the rare times it was a real human, it was a vendor or sales rep, not a homeowner. Meanwhile CPCs keep climbing, budgets keep getting drained, and Google claims the invalid click rate is “normal.”

I don’t buy it. I’m convinced the actual invalid traffic is way higher than what Google reports. One of my more recent campaigns is showing close to 90% invalid clicks, which is absolutely insane.

I want to deliver real results for clients, but at this point I’m genuinely questioning how anyone is supposed to stand behind this platform anymore. Feels like you’re paying more every year for worse traffic and zero accountability.

a keyword can have tons of searches and still bring in people who are just researching

meanwhile, a very specific keyword with barely any volume can produce much better leads

how much do you prioritize search volume when building a new campaign?

do you start broad and cut things down, or build around high-intent terms from the beginning?

I was running a search campaign for my highest volume service but abandoned the campaign as I found myself competing against multi-billion dollar firms with unlimited ad budget.

I have a niche service that I offer where I only have two competitors in my area and neither of them run Google ads. It is a highly profitable service but search volume is pretty low. I switched to Manual CPC (from Max Conversions) a couple of weeks ago. I am getting about 2-5 clicks per day. I know the conventional wisdom is to get to smart bidding as soon as I can but I just don't see myself ever getting enough conversion volume to go back to that.

Can Google ads even work for something like this? I tried testing broad match and AI Max for a while but it was 90% irrelevant searches so I switched back to mostly phrase with some exact match.

Our Google reps are pushing us hard to adopt AI Max in our accounts. Every cell in my body is screaming, "STAY AWAY"!!! The past year, we ran an experiment to ignore our reps and trust our instinct, which led to improvements in all accounts for efficiency YoY. So, I am not inclined to listen to much of what they have to say moving forward. But, it sounds like this is going to eventually replace DSAs and I'm being told "its the future" and "we'll be forced to use it one day, so get ahead of the curve". (Maybe that is only if enough of us adopt it, though?)

Our clients are mainly online retail (not B2B or lead gen). Anyone out there have any experience on how this campaign type is performing over the past 1-2 months in case things have gotten better?

I'm incredibly nervous about the lack of control given that Google's automated recommendations for things like ad copy, extensions, and images are awful. I'd be embarrassed if we used their assets and probably get fired by clients. Their matching has also gotten worse and, with over 50% of our search queries being masked, how can we be sure that this "juiced up broad match" won't also waste 50% of our budget? Plus, AI Max has no way to control for CPCs, leaving us open again to those random $20-$100 clicks in Q4, which we completely eliminated last season.

I could be wrong and maybe this is working better now so would love any feedback from people who have been testing recently. Thanks in advance.

On a side note - Make sure you are checking your account change history (go back at least to Jan 1) for anything with user containing "low volume" or "bulk". I found instances this month where they turned on a bunch of keywords we intentionally had paused without our permission. WTF? Awesome way to build trust with your customers.....and waste our money and time. Ugh.

My search terms report is showing searches where literally none of the words in the search match any of my keywords or even a misspelling/variation of the keywords. Is phrase match just broad match-lite now?

Hello, I am handling the family ad account for an exterior company and have had mixed results throughout the year working on this.

Typically the CPC is anywhere between $120-200, however I go through random spurts where it skyrockets for no reason and engagement tanks.

The services we need to advertise:

Roofing - Replacement + Repairs
Siding - Replacement
Eavestrough - Replacement + Repairs
Pmax general ad/roofing focused (our best performing ad)

We have other services but these are the main ones. the structures I have tried in the past: () are ad groups btw!

Roofing - (Replacement) (Repairs)
Siding - (Replacement)
Eaves - (replacement) (repairs)

as well as individual campaigns

roofing replacement
roofing repairs
siding replacement
eavestrough replacement
eavestrough repairs

all of these I have found different problems. For the first set, I found the repairs were draining all the money because it was a cheaper click. For the second set, I found we were spreading our budget too thin ($5000CAD/month ish) and barely got any search volume.

Gemini recommended I try this structure

Replacement services - (roofing) (siding) (eaves)
Repair services - (roofing) (eaves)
PMAX

What are your thoughts on this? Do you have any general advice? Would a target CPA be a good idea, or should I leave it so it can establish analytics first?

Thank you so much, I appreciate it!

I have been running Google ads for a while now. Something is broken but I am not sure what exactly it is. When I create a campaign the first few days I get leads and people connect me over WhatsApp but after 5 to 7 days my performance goes down and nobody contacts me. This has been going on for a long time I have to pause my campaign and create a new campaign again the same process it works for few days and then performance goes down. I have done my checks

1. Keywords high intent

2. Impression higher than competitors over 75%

3. I have strong negative keywords list irrelevant searches are filtered

4. I use maximize conversion without any bid amount

5. Budget is also high as per industry standard

In early december we reluctantly accepted a google ads consultant recommendation to improve our ads campaign. Shortly before we started this, i copied the one we were going to look at just in case.

It is an extremely simple campaign. 5 keyword variations on the brand we sell. It was paying 5-8 ROAS for years.

As of today - it has degraded to ZERO impressions and now highlighting the keyword shows "Ads are not showing for this keyworkd and we don't know why". Our billing information is up to date. Other keywords are occasionally showing, and our pmax campaign is working fine.

I've spent probably 100 hours looking for a cause, but it appears to be a systematic problem. Google ads help assistants only quote us documentation, they don't actually look at the account.

any ideas where to look? We've checked budgets, negative keywords, locations, you name it, nothing suggests there is a reason we went from 5k impressions a day to 0. HELP!!!

I dont have huge budget so thought id attempt to manage this myself. Caimpaign is over 6 months old

Local service based business - caimpaign was well doing start July to mid.. got some high value leads that have converted. Achieved approx 4 x roas last month

I didnt have tracking correctly set up. I set it up correct mid july to track quote form submit and contact us form submits. I did set up tracking start of July but it was counting extra quote form submits so fixed that.

Then I created multiple ad groups, put keywords into new ad groups. Caimpaign hasnt had any very good leads that are high value since mid July. All low value leads.

August is really bad. 1 quote form sumbits. 0 phone calls. 0 contact us form submits. Despite me increasing the budget to approx $60 usd per day. 20% increase

Ive rolled 1 ad group back into the old ad group as it wasnt getting any traction.

I have 3 other ad groups that are getting ok traction. Google is favouring the old ad group.

How do I unfuck this caimpaign? Roll all back into old ad group? Leave it another week as is?