Google Ads Not Converting - Discover Why (and How to Fix It)

Okay, you just set up a brand new account or campaign, you have action, you've got clicks and impressions. However, no conversions. Or maybe you've been running a campaign before and now you haven't had conversions. Maybe it's been a few days, a week, maybe even a month. No conversions. What the heck has happened? What is wrong? Right? I am going to show you exactly what you should be checking not only in your Google Ads account, but also on your website to fix why you're getting zero conversions in your Google Ads account. So let's go ahead and dive in. Number one, if conversion tracking isn't working, you're not going to get conversions. So the number one thing to check is your conversion tag. So inside of your account, if you go to Goals and you go to Conversion Summary, you'll find your conversion tags. This is in an account where our tag is fine. You'll see it's active. There's no active issues here. However, you can click on the tag, you can see settings, web pages, see if there's any issues in regards to how the tag is actually firing. The other thing you can do, it's called Google Tag Assistant. Google Tag Assistant, you can run on the pages that your tag should be firing and it will tell you whether or not there's an issue there. So here I just fired a tag on a thank you page. I will have to have probably most of that blurred out. So since it is a client's website and account, but Tag Assistant ran and this is showing me all the tags that have fired in regards to that specific success page after you make a purchase. So if you had an issue with your tag, Tag Assistant will help you determine if there is that issue depending on the page that you're firing on. So whether that's the purchase page after order confirmation after someone orders, if you're E Commerce, or it could just be simply a thank you page. If you're doing a form fill, but check your conversion tag, that is the immediate first thing to do if if you're not getting any conversions. Okay. Number two, keyword targeting. If your keyword targeting is bad and you're sending irrelevant bad traffic to your offer, you're not gonna convert anything. So here's an example of a real account. I'm inside the search term report. To get there, I'm inside this campaign, you just go to the Insights and Report tab and then you click Search Terms. Okay, so this shows you the search terms that your keywords fired your ads from this specific account. They're using a lot of broad keywords in the broad match type. Now I have a video on keyword match types, how they work and I also have a full video on how to set up a search campaign the correct way. So both of those videos will be in the description below. Highly recommend checking those out. In their case, their setup is completely, completely wrong. And so they're getting a ton of irrelevant traffic. This company sells parts, tractor parts for various different brands. What they don't sell though is big Green Tractors Tractors. Green tractors. They, they're not selling full size tractors. So if we if you're getting a bunch of irrelevant traffic, you're not going to convert anything. So absolutely, if you are in a scenario where you're not getting any conversions, check the traffic. Is the traffic any good? If it isn't, clean it up. Number three, check your ads. Are your ads even working? And when I mean working, I mean are they actually sending the traffic to the correct page? So go into your campaign, literally click an ad. Is it working correctly? Is the landing page working correctly once you get there? There have been cases where I have found that ads were not working and they did not fire a 404 error page. And so Google never even realized that you were sending traffic to a page that wasn't working. So simply go check your ads, click the ad in the account, don't just look at it and make sure is this page that, that I'm sending traffic to even live right now, Is it working correctly? So make sure to actually go check the ads themselves. Number four, check your landing pages. Now I just got done telling you to check your ads and then click the ads and make sure the page is actually firing correctly and sending to the correct page if you're now on the page. So if your E commerce is going to be a product page normally and if you're lead generation, you probably have a landing page with like form fills or phone calls. Check the page, actually go through the funnel process. So lead generation, fill the form out, call the number. If you're E Commerce, go through and actually make a purchase of the product. Not saying physically like go through the whole purchase process but make sure there is no issue within the funnel itself on how the page should behaving. Because if you're sending correct traffic and you have correct conversion tracking and your ad is set up correctly and sending the traffic, this relevant high intent traffic to your landing pages is the actual page itself functioning to bring that searcher to the finish line of actually converting. So check the components, go through the page, make the steps that an actual customer would make in order to fire a conversion that make sure you have no issues there. Number five, check your other traffic channels so you're more than likely using GA4, and if you're not using GA4, then you're probably using some form of an analytics tool. Check the other traffic channels. Are there issues with organic, with direct, with social, with email, with whatever other traffic channels you may have? Go in there, look at the data. Am I getting conversions still from my other channels? Am I seeing conversion rate dips from those other channels which might indicate a website issue somewhere? So check the other channels just to make sure this isn't just a paid ads issue. Now, if everything looks fine, then, okay, this is a Google Ads issue that I need to fix. So you'll. Again, this is all we're trying to do is take variables out and check each step here to figure out where the potential leak is as to why we're getting no conversions in the Google Ads account. So check those other channels. If there's issues there, then you probably have a bigger issue, a website issue. If there is no issues there, then at least you know and you're confirming, okay, this still is a Google Ads issue. Number six, campaign settings. Now, I already mentioned I have a full video on how to set up a search campaign the right way. I actually go through step by step, the campaign settings there. So if you're unfamiliar with all the settings, go watch that video. However, check the campaign settings. I have done audits or consultations with companies where they're not getting the results they want. And then I went through their campaign settings and I'm like, hey guys, you're supposed to be targeting the United States and you ended up targeting, you know, other countries. I think there was one where for whatever reason, they had the entire world as a target. So they weren't even just targeting the United States, it was the entire world. So you're not going to get any conversions if all of your traffic's coming from another country that you don't even service or sell to. So go check the campaign settings. Make sure everything is set up correctly to confirm that this is not a campaign setting or structure. Issue. Number seven, website changes. I always ask in cases where there's no conversions happening or we had a campaign that was getting conversions and it broke and I just went through all the previous steps. Everything else looks fine. Is there something on the website that has changed recently? So I asked the developer team what changes have made place from the timeframe of that. I'M looking at within my Google Ads account. There have been cases where a developer has implemented something incorrectly on the website that killed Google Ads traffic completely. So we were still sending traffic to the website, but the way those URLs were being tracked and that traffic was being tracked was killing the actual attribution to to Google Ads. I've seen it with cookie scripts, I've seen it with SEO changes they were making that went wrong. I forget the actual change that was made in that specific case, but they were doing some SEO work and they did something that really screwed up all the attribution. Not just Google Ads, but for other channels they had as well. And so it was simply a backend change that I was unaware of or our team was unaware of. And we just had to ask, hey, what have you guys changed on the website? And if they said, we haven't really changed anything, okay, maybe it's not a website issue, but trust me, I have been in these puzzles where you're like, what the heck is going on? Why is there no conversions? And every other step that I just taught you is fine. And then sure enough, it was nothing to do with even Google Ads settings or landing page. It was the website back end change that the dev team made that caused an attribution break. So just check with them if this is what you're experiencing. The last step, and no one likes to hear this, but if you just went through all of the steps that I taught you, conversion tracking, keyword targeting, ad URLs, landing pages, checking the other traffic sources, your campaign settings, any website changes, checking with the developers, and everything is clear there, then you have to take an honest look. Is my offer any good? If you have a crap offer, you will not convert. It doesn't matter how much traffic you throw at it, if you have a crap offer, you will not convert. Check. Is my offer competitive? Is my pricing competition competitive? Is my offer clear? Does it even make sense? Go and check as if, as if you were the searcher and you were putting in those keywords, those highly relevant keywords into Google Search and you go to your landing page. Does this resonate with what I'm trying to offer? Is my call to action clear? 9 times out of 10 on accounts that aren't working correctly, if it's not a technical issue, like I just showed step one through seven, then it's an offer issue. And most of the time it's just your offer isn't clear or your offer is just crap compared to what the competition has. People don't just click and then end up buying, right, or end up giving you their information. They all go normally through what Google calls the messy middle. But they're just checking essentially other offers and checking competitors. Am I getting the best product for the best price? Am I getting the best offer with the best company? They're out there doing the research, they're out there comparing you. And so if your offer is crap, you're just not going to generate conversion. So have that honest conversation with yourself first. If you consulted with me and you came to me and said you wanted to run Google Ads and you showed me your offer and I knew your offer was not good, I, I would tell you, don't waste your money, figure the offer out first because you have to have a good offer. If you don't have a good offer, you've got nothing. And it doesn't matter how much money you throw at it, it just isn't going to convert. So if tactically everything's fine and you're still not getting conversions, then your offer just might not be any good. Bonus tip. Go and search a keyword that's going to fire your ad. This is going to cost you money. I'm sorry, but go and search a keyword that's going to fire an ad for you. Find your ad. So here's Home Reserve. This is a client of mine. I've done many videos in regards to using their account, but if they were having a conversion issue, I would actually click this ad. Now I'm not going to do that, but I would actually click this ad. Then I would go make a purchase. Now if you're an agency or a freelancer, a lot of times clients have discount codes they can give you. So this doesn't actually cost you money or you actually make the purchase and then you just do a refund right away. So you give them a heads up. That way their customer support team and shipping team isn't like right on it and processing your order right after you make it. So you have to pre plan this, but go make an order, go make a purchase. That way you 100% know. All right, I clicked an ad, I made a purchase or I clicked an ad and I filled the form out. If it's lead generation or I click the ad and I called the number, then the next day it's not going to show. Usually the exact moment you do it, but within a 24 hour period. So if you, if you do it on a Thursday check Friday morning, you should now see a conversion that's populated inside of the account that will give you confirmation if you're actually getting or if your conversion tracking is working. And there was no tactical issues throughout that process. So most of those tactics that I just talked about in this video that you needed to go check and review, that actually could all be done really through clicking one of your own ads and going through a purchase or a form fill, depending on if you're E Commerce or lead generation. But normally I save this for last. I will do these tactics first without going through the headache of going and purchasing and needing to refund or get discount codes or any of that. So just a bonus tip though, if you're still unsure, just go click an ad, go through the conversion process and then see if it actually populates in the account. There you go. You now know how to find the issue if you're getting no conversions in your Google Ads account. Hopefully after watching this video you were able to find the actual issue as to why you're getting no conversions in your account and now you're going to get conversions and hopefully start making lots of money. I hope you got great value from this video again. I also talked about how to set up search campaigns the right way of several times throughout this video. Make sure to go check that out. If you haven't lots of gold in that video, that will be in the description below and it's probably going to be somewhere on on this screen as well. I'll see you on the next video.