Usually the traffic is fine and everything after the click is broken. Check in this order: are you paying for search terms that will never buy; does the click land on a page built to convert or on your homepage; do you follow up within minutes; is conversion tracking even installed. Ad copy is the last thing to blame, and the first thing most people rewrite.
Broad match will spend your budget on searches that merely resemble yours. A plumber bidding "emergency plumber" can end up paying for "how to fix a leaking tap" — someone explicitly trying not to hire a plumber.
Open the search terms report. Not keywords — **search terms**, the actual phrases people typed. Most neglected accounts have a substantial share of spend on terms with no purchase intent. Add those as negative keywords.
Your homepage explains who you are. Someone who searched for a specific service needs that service, a reason to trust you, and one obvious action. A homepage makes them hunt.
One page per campaign, matching the promise in the ad. If the ad says emergency callout, the page says emergency callout — not a general services menu.
A form filled at 2pm and answered at 6pm is usually a lost customer. People searching for a service contact several providers and buy from whoever responds first.
This is not really a marketing problem, which is why it goes unfixed for months while the ad copy gets rewritten repeatedly. An auto-reply that sets expectations, plus a genuine attempt to call within the hour, changes outcomes more than any bidding change.
Without conversion tracking Google optimises for clicks, because clicks are all you gave it to optimise for. It will faithfully find you the cheapest clicks from the people least likely to buy.
Track the actions that matter — form submissions and phone calls — and let the platform optimise toward those. This single fix routinely changes account economics more than any creative work.
Five campaigns on $10/day each will all under-perform. The algorithm needs conversion volume to learn, and thin budgets never accumulate enough signal.
Pick the one service with the best margin and concentrate spend there until it works. Expand after, not before.
If the search terms are clean, the landing page matches, follow-up is fast and tracking is live — then yes, test the copy. Address the specific hesitation your customers actually voice.
But this is sixth on the list for a reason. Rewriting ads while sending traffic to a homepage nobody converts on is rearranging furniture in a burning room.
Expect a few weeks of data before judging anything, and longer if conversion volume is low. Judging a campaign on three days of spend is guessing.
Almost always the landing page or the follow-up, not the ads. Clicks prove the ad worked. Everything after the click is where the failure sits.
Start tighter — phrase or exact — until you know which terms convert. Broad match with a small budget and no negative keyword list burns money quickly.