No Conversions from Google Ads? Do This [Updated for 2026]

If you are currently wasting in your Google Ads campaigns, in that you are paying for clicks but you are getting no conversions, I want you to stick around because in this video, I'm going to take you through the exact four step process that we go through to not only find why you're not getting any conversions, but also start to implement those important optimizations so that you can start getting some conversions and sales for your business from the money that you're investing in Google Ads. And let's start with the important first step right now. Now, before you even go inside of your Google Ads dashboard, the first important thing that you need to find out is that is this a Google Ads problem or is it affecting all of my different traffic sources? So whether that would be traffic that's coming from your paid social media, from organic traffic, or even from different emails that you're sending out. So the action that you want to take here is that you want to compare the different traffic sources. And what you're really wanting to find out here, is it only Google Ads that is not converting, or am I just getting no conversions at all across all of my different platforms? The reason for this is so important because it isolates and answers this core question. Is this problem just with Google Ads and if it is Google Ads, we can then go through the steps to fix that at Google Ads campaign, or if it's affecting all of our different traffic sources, we know the problem is not only Google Ads, but it's got more to do with our landing and our offer. Now, in order to find out this important first step, you want to go into Google Analytics or any acquisition tool that you're using. It could be your own internal CRM or a product like Triple Whale. And what you're really trying to find out here, once again, is it only Google Ads, it's not converting, or am I seeing the same poor performance across all of my different traffic sources? So when you're Inside Google Analytics 4 or whatever software you're using, you want to go through and find the feature where you can see your traffic from your different acquisition sources. What we do want to do when we're inside of Google Analytics or any of the other platforms that you're looking at, if you do see that it's not just Google Ads that none of your platforms are performing, what you want to be doing is you want to go through and have a look at a metric which is called your session time. Now this could be session average, session duration, maybe worded at different way depending on what platform you're looking at, but this is kind of a baseline feature that we're looking at. And this is not going to solve all the problems, but it is going to let you know really, really quickly where the problem seems to lie. If you are getting people who are going to your site and they're spending less than 30 seconds on your site from those different traffic sources, particularly in this video from Google Ads, we know that this is more got to do with what we would call a targeting problem. What's happening there is that they are getting to your website and they may have come from a keyword search. They click on your ad, they get to your website and they just immediately go it not relevant. So it could still be your landing page, but that's a telltale site, especially if that's under 10 seconds, that you do definitely have a keyword targeting problem. That's of course saying that you don't have any website loading issues or anything like that. But if you are seeing that you're getting more than 60 seconds, so you're getting people to go to your website and they are actually interested, so they're going through reading your product information or your service information, but then you're still not getting any conversions, it's probably pointing to the fact that you have an offer problem. And that offer problem could be anything to do with the price point. It could also have to do with just the way that you are wording your actual offer and the services you're providing. Or if you're selling products, it could have to do with your shipping. But essentially what you're looking at there, especially if you're not getting conversions across the board, I'll be spending a lot more time about your offer and your landing page before you start changing too much around Google Ads, because as we've said, you've got people coming across, they're spending at least a minute on your site. So you've got some pretty good indications and that you are targeting the right type of traffic. If you're not getting those conversions, it's more likely got to do with your offer and your landing page. Because in this video I very much want to focus on what's happening inside of Google Ads. But if you stick around to this end of this video, I'm going to give you some extra videos that you can watch from me that are on this YouTube channel which take you through how to improve your landing pages and also your offers. Let's just say from here you do have a targeting problem in that the keyword traffic or the messaging that you're using inside of Google Ads does need to be improved. In order to solve this and get to steps two, three and four, we need to go inside of that Google Ads account. And the process I'm going to be taking you through here is what we call our stab method of optimization, which is where we look at our segmentation, our targeting, our ads and landing pages, and also our bidding. So I'm going to take you through this process. But if you'd like more training about this, I encourage you to follow the link in the description below where you can get access to a free tool which I provide, which is called Start and Scale with Google Ads. That would not only give you access to my Google Ads Optimization checklist, it also gives you access to a series of 30 plus training videos where I step by step walk you through how to complete those actions. You also get training and some teaching on how, how and when to use the different types of Google Ads campaigns, plus how to set them up correctly. And then you also get access to an exclusive masterclass which I share about Google Ads in 2026. If you want all of that, just follow that link in the description below. But right now let's jump into a screen share so I can take you through or walk you through steps two, three and four. So now we're inside of a Google Ads account, I want to take you through step two. And step two is all about checking the relevance of your search traffic. So what we want to make sure here is that those clicks that we are paying for, are they actually relevant to your products or your services that you're wanting to target? This has become more and more relevant, especially in 2025 and 2026 with the age of a overviews and AI mode. With Google making its keyword targeting broader, many businesses think that their search term traffic is on relevant because they're using things like exact match keywords. But the whole thing to remember is that exact match isn't actually exact match anymore because it goes on the meaning of that phrase, not just the individual keyword. So what you want to be doing is you want to be checking the relevance also as well. If you are using anything like performance max, you need to be really, really careful because the data that you're feeding into your performance max campaign may be swaying what Google is wanting to go through and actually target for your ads. So the first thing we need to go through and do is let's go through and have a look at our search term. Aud like to separate this out from our Performance Max campaign. This account is only running a search campaign. So it's quite easy to see this. You can go into individual campaigns if you'd like to. I do prefer to go do this by campaign status, just because if you are running multiple campaigns, you want to go through and check this at a campaign level. If you're running a whole lot of different campaigns, you may want to first do this across your total account and then you can go through and filter it down by the campaign. So why you go through and do this is if you want to go on a campaign level, click on the individual campaign and then go to insights and reports and search terms. If you want to do it for the whole account, you just go straight to that insights and report. So let's go into the individual campaign and we are in insights and reports and search terms. And essentially what you're just doing here is you're going through and having a look at this search term data and you really just want to make sure are the search terms which my ads are appearing for, are they relevant in the term? Are they relevant to my product or my services? Easiest way to answer this, I always come back to if I was looking for your own products. So the products or the services that you're selling, is that what you would search? And that's really what you're looking for in and you just want to make sure that there's nothing that isn't related to services that you don't provide or for products that you don't provide. One thing that you can do through here as well, I like to essentially very much what I call follow where the money goes and you want to filter it down by the cost. Sometimes Google will automatically convert this down by clicks or conversions. But I really want to follow where am I spending the most amount of money and is that relevant? That's the way that you do it for your search campaigns and also the way that you do it for your shopping campaigns. For Performance Max, this actually happens in the same way. So we just go into our Performance Max campaign, go into Insights Reports, then go into our search terms and once again we're seeing the search terms that are triggering our ads. And once again we just go through that same process and making sure that we're not seeing any irrelevant search terms. You may ask what happens if that is happening. So there's two things you want to be doing. Firstly, you can go through and this happens on all accounts and you can go through and add these as negative keywords. But what you want to do, especially if you're running in search campaigns, you want to go through and just make sure that your campaign structure or your keyword structure is set right. More and more, what we're finding inside of Google Ads, which is what's working, we have one or two broad match keywords that have at least three or four words in them. And then we build out some really, really highly specific exact match keywords. You don't need that many exact match keywords. And that's the general process that we see works the most. There is some nuance there if you're in a really, really hyper, hyper specific niche. So like a niche within a niche. Sometimes you may want to be really careful with your broad match keywords. But where possible, we do like to use broad match because it's one of the main ways that your ads can appear in AI overviews and AI mode. All right, that's the second step. The second step is finding out, answering the question, is my search term traffic relevant? If it's not, you need to go through and update your keywords and also add in those negative keywords. The second thing is that you want to go through and check the relevance of your ads or as I said, the third thing. So second thing inside of Google Ads. But now we're up to step number three. We wanted to check the relevance of our ads. This is a click through ratio. Inside of Google Ads is a bit of a funny thing at the moment. The reason for that, because of the increasing growth in AO overviews and AO mode, we are seeing a bit of a drop inside of click through ratios. However, there was some data from Wordstream that was released over the last couple of years that the click through ratio has generally been across all of the accounts for search campaigns around about that high sixes, so six and a half to seven. So we still look at a benchmark of around about 10% for your search campaigns. For your shopping campaigns that does come down to about 3%. And for the display campaigns that comes down to about 1%. So what you want to be looking at in through here is this is all letting us know is our actual ad copy relevant. So the way that you can go through and have a look at this is I do want to go through and have a look at the search terms. You also do want to pull up a couple of extra columns which you can pull up through here. And you may want to pull what's called a search impression share and the reason why I like to pull up that one as well Is it? That kind of lets me know. So I know for this account we're getting about 30% of search impression share. An easy way to explain that is that for this campaign, every 100 searches we're appearing on 30 of them. So what I really want to be looking at in through here is that we can see our click through ratio is about a 9.3, which is a really, really good result. If you've got a click through ratio, especially for search, which is under 5%, that is really giving you some warning signs to let you know that from the search terms. So we know that the search term is relevant. If they're seeing your ad and not clicking on your ad, you need to really go through and think about your ad copies. And what I want you to think about is that not only do you want to make sure that you have a keyw word focused in your ad copy, but you also want to make sure that you're pulling out some really, really clear emotional triggers and you are also going through and showing ads that have objective facts in them. So you don't just, just stay away from wishy washy statements like where number one, wherever possible put percentage values or dollar values in there. That's quite a big subject in itself. So at the end of this video I'll also include a link, I have some extra training about how you can improve the quality of your ads. So step one, find out whether this is just about Google Ads or all of your platforms. Step two, you want to go through and really make sure is your keyword relevant? Step three is all about is your ad copy relevant? Step number four is that you really want to be checking not only campaign types, but even more important than that, you want to be checking your bidding strategy. Your bidding strategy becomes really, really relevant if you've had an account where you've started to see month on month growth. You introduced a bidding strategy and then you just saw the performance of your account start to drop. I want to show you a real example here. And what I want to show you in through here is I'm showing this in a metric which you can see which is called your average target roas. And you can see from here the customer actually reduced their target ROAS or changed their target rose from 200 to 175 down to 170. But I want you to have a look at what happened with the clicks. They started to see the actual clicks drop and more importantly, they actually started to see their conversions or the actual conversion value of the business or the conversion value that was coming in from Google Ads drop. So that's a really clear indication that they set the wrong target roas. Now let me show you how quick this change can happen. This is actually an account that we did an order from. We highlighted this to them and over the last 14 days they increased their target ROAS back up to 200 clicks have gone up and the sales have already started to go up as well. Now it's too early to tell the exact process of that because we've just made that change. We need that change to sit in for about three to four weeks before we really know where it's sitting. But as we can see straight away from making that change, we've really seen an increase in their clicks and their search traffic go up and we've also started to see this green line increase. That's the four step process that we go through if you are spending money in Google Ads and not getting any conversions at all. Now remember, as I said throughout the video, if you want to get access to that free teaching tool so that I can walk you through the process in greater details of how to improve your Google Ads accounts you want to get access to start and scale, just follow that link in the description below. And if you'd like to know more about how to improve your landing pages and your offer, I want you to go through and watch this interview that I did here with a copywriting and offer expert. Or if you'd like to know more about ad copy and how you can write the best ad copy for Google Ads, I want you to go through and watch this video right here. Hey, thanks for joining me. See you next time.