The money is going out. The dashboard is showing you something that looks wrong. And somebody, possibly you, wants an answer by the end of the day.
Here is what makes this hard to fix by searching for it: “Google Ads not working” describes four completely different problems, and the fixes have nothing in common. Ads that never appear are a different disease from ads that appear and get ignored, which is different again from ads that get clicked by people who never call. The fourth one is the strangest of the lot: the campaign is working, the phone is ringing, and the account is telling you it isn’t.
Same symptom. Completely different disease.
Ask about this in any advertising community and someone will tell you that you set it up wrong. They are usually right, and it is almost never useful, because it does not tell you which part you got wrong. So this article starts by working out which of the four you actually have. Everything after that depends on it.
The sixty-second triage
Open your account, set the date range to the last 30 days, and read four numbers in this order. The first one that comes back zero or obviously wrong is your answer.
| What you see | The state you are in | What it is actually about |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions: 0 | 1. Not serving | Approval, billing, budget, targeting |
| Impressions yes, clicks: 0 or tiny | 2. Not winning the click | Relevance, position, ad copy, match types |
| Clicks yes, conversions: 0 | 3. Not converting | Landing page, intent, follow-up, offer |
| Conversions look wrong, but the phone rings | 4. Working, but invisible | Tracking, windows, attribution |
Swipe sideways to see the full table.
Everything below is ordered by how fast each cause rules itself out, not by how often it happens. That ordering is the point: searching for Google Ads not working returns a hundred possible causes and no way to sort them. Nobody can honestly tell you that broken tracking causes a specific percentage of failures. What we can tell you is which checks take ten seconds, so you spend your afternoon on the ones that are left.
Before any of it, the question the search results are shouting about: is it Google, or is it you?
Google runs a public status dashboard for Ads. If there is a genuine platform incident, it says so there. Check it, then let go of the idea, because it is almost never Google. In the accounts KLEXA opens, a real outage has never once been the explanation. If the interface itself is misbehaving, loading half a page or refusing to save changes, that is usually your browser rather than the platform, and clearing cache and cookies is the documented first step. Two minutes, then move on to the real diagnosis.
State 1: your ads are not serving at all
Zero impressions. Nothing is being shown to anybody, so nothing downstream matters yet.
Is it actually enabled? Campaign, ad group and the ads themselves each carry their own status, and all three have to be on. A paused ad group inside an enabled campaign shows zero impressions and looks exactly like a mystery.
Is billing healthy, at both levels? A declined card or an account hold stops delivery immediately and quietly. Then check the account-level daily spending limit, which is separate from your campaign budgets and occasionally sits at zero. That one is cruel, because every campaign looks perfectly configured while nothing can spend.
Is the account verified? New accounts get held for verification, and an unverified account can sit at zero impressions indefinitely while looking healthy. If you are more than a week into a brand-new account with nothing at all, that is not a warm-up period. Something specific is blocking it.
Are the ads approved? Disapproved ads do not run, and ads still under review do not run yet. The policy reason sits next to the ad, and some categories take longer than you expect.
Has the budget already run out today? A campaign that spends its daily budget by 10am serves nothing afterwards. That reads as “not working” if you always check in the afternoon.
Do the dates and the schedule allow it? End dates that passed, start dates in the future, ad schedules restricted to hours nobody mentioned. This one embarrasses people regularly.
Is the location targeting doing what you think? Set it to PRESENCE for local businesses, so you reach people physically in your area rather than merely interested in it. The wrong setting either sprays budget across the country or makes you invisible in your own town.
Are the keywords ever searched? Low search volume keywords are exactly what they sound like. An ad group built on phrases nobody types has no auction to enter.
Are your bids under the floor? If the market pays twenty dollars a click and you offered two, you are not in the auction in any meaningful sense.
One warning about status labels, because it stops more diagnoses than anything else on this list. “Eligible” does not mean “working.” It means nothing is blocking you from competing. You can be perfectly eligible and still never appear, because eligibility is permission to enter the auction, not success inside it.
The fastest single check for all of the above is the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool inside Google Ads. Type in the keyword and it tells you whether your ad can show and, if not, why. Most owners never open it. It answers the question in about four seconds, without burning an impression.
State 2: impressions, but no clicks
You are serving. Nobody is clicking.
First, a sanity check that saves a lot of wasted worry: at very low impression volume, a zero CTR is noise. Forty impressions and no clicks tells you almost nothing. Four thousand impressions and no clicks tells you plenty.
If the volume is real, there are three honest explanations.
You are showing, but not where anyone looks. Impression share and top-of-page rate tell you this. Position is decided by Ad Rank, which combines your bid with ad quality and context rather than bid alone, so a low position is not automatically a bidding problem. Quality Score, scored one to ten from expected click-through rate (CTR), ad relevance and landing page experience, is the diagnostic underneath it. Read it, do not chase it.
Your ad does not answer the search. The searcher types something specific and your headline says something generic. Their words should appear in your ad. If the keyword is “emergency roof leak repair” and the headline says “Quality Home Services Since 1998,” you have written an ad about yourself instead of about them.
Your match types are pulling searches you cannot answer. Broad match with no negative keywords collects queries adjacent to your business, and adjacent queries do not click. The impressions look healthy. The intent behind them is not.
State 3: clicks, but no conversions
This is where most struggling accounts actually are, and where the most money disappears before anybody notices. People arrive. Nobody contacts you.
The landing page is your homepage. Ad traffic arrives with a specific question and the homepage answers a general one. Send the click to a page about the thing they searched for.
The message does not match. Someone searched for emergency repair, clicked an ad about emergency repair, and landed on a page leading with your company history and a team photo. They leave in four seconds.
Contacting you is harder than it looks on a phone. Most of this traffic is mobile. If there is no click-to-call number in the first screen, or the form asks nine questions, you are converting a fraction of what you could.
The traffic is junk. Job seekers, competitors, DIY searchers and suppliers all click ads. If your negative keyword list has not been touched in months, a meaningful slice of budget is going to people who were never going to buy.
Nobody follows up fast enough. Speed to lead is invisible in the interface and lethal in the business. A caller who reaches voicemail, or a form nobody answers until tomorrow, is indistinguishable in your reports from a lead that never existed.
We wrote the account-level version of these in detail in common Google Ads mistakes, and the junk traffic problem has its own guide to negative keywords. If the triage landed you here, those two are next.
State 4: it is working, and you cannot see it
Now the state that appears on none of the pages competing for this search, and the one that causes the most unnecessary panic in accounts we take over.
The interface shows few conversions or none. Meanwhile the phone rings, the inbox has enquiries in it, and the team is quoting work. Both things are true at once. The campaign is producing and the conversion tracking is blind.
Here is the test that separates State 4 from State 3, and it takes one question: is anything happening in the business that the account is not showing you? If the phone rings while the dashboard says zero, you do not have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem, and they need completely different fixes.
Calls are not counted as conversions. In most local and service businesses the majority of leads arrive by phone. An account counting only form submissions is blind to most of its own results, and Smart Bidding is optimising against a fraction of reality.
The conversion window is shorter than your sales cycle. The default click-through conversion window is 30 days. If a typical customer takes six weeks to decide, those conversions genuinely happen and genuinely never get recorded against the click that caused them. Nobody changed a setting to break this. It is the factory default meeting a longer sales cycle.
Offline outcomes never make it back. The lead becomes a quote, the quote becomes a job, and none of it returns to the ad account as offline conversion imports. The campaign that produced your best customer looks identical to the one that produced nothing.
You are comparing two tools that count differently. Google Ads and GA4 will never agree exactly, because they use different attribution models and different dates. That gap is not a bug and not evidence of failure.
There is a fifth version worth checking before you blame anything: did performance fall shortly after somebody changed something? Meaningful edits to budgets, bids, bid strategy or conversion actions restart the learning process, and the dip that follows gets blamed on the platform rather than the edit. Open your change history, line the dates up against the drop, and see whether you are looking at a fault or a consequence.
If this is your state, our guides to GA4 for service businesses and CallRail cover the two halves of the fix, and there is a longer piece on evaluation timing and attribution lag for anyone whose sales cycle runs into months.
The question nobody asks: could this budget ever have worked?
Before blaming the platform, do the arithmetic. This is the least popular section of this article and the most important one.
Take your monthly budget and divide it by a realistic CPC, or cost per click, for your industry. That is roughly how many clicks you can buy. Multiply that by a realistic landing page conversion rate, and you have the number of leads the campaign could ever have produced in a perfect month.
Work an example. Six hundred dollars a month, in a market where clicks cost twenty five dollars, buys twenty four clicks. At a healthy ten percent conversion rate, that is two or three leads. Not two or three a week. Two or three a month, best case, with everything working perfectly.
Now divide that budget across four campaigns and the problem multiplies. Each one gets six clicks, none of them gathers enough data to improve, and all four look broken. A thin budget spread thinner is not a strategy.
If the number comes out under one, the campaign was never going to work, and no amount of settings tinkering changes it. That is not a Google problem. That is arithmetic. Either fund it above the floor for your market or put the money somewhere it buys enough attempts to matter. Our guide to setting a Google Ads budget walks through the sums properly.
I have had this argument more than once, and it is never a popular thing to say to somebody who has just spent three months being disappointed. It is usually the truest thing in the account.
Two things this article does not cover
If your account is suspended, that is a different process with its own evidence requirements and appeal timelines, and a paragraph here would not do it justice.
If you run ecommerce, the four states still apply, but Merchant Center, feed quality and Shopping diagnostics add a whole layer this article does not. This one is written for businesses generating leads and enquiries.
Questions people ask when their ads stop working
Is there a problem with Google Ads today?
Almost certainly not. Google publishes a live status dashboard for Ads, and genuine platform incidents appear there and get resolved quickly. If the dashboard is clear, the cause is in your account. If the interface itself is misbehaving rather than your campaigns, clear your browser cache and cookies before assuming anything worse.
Why did my Google Ads suddenly stop working?
Sudden stops usually have unglamorous causes: a declined payment method, an ad newly disapproved after a policy update, an edited budget, a campaign end date arriving, or someone pausing something. Check billing and ad status first, then open your change history to see what was edited and when. A sudden change almost always has a specific event behind it, and quite often that event was a change somebody made on purpose.
Why are my Google Ads not getting impressions?
Either you are not eligible to show, or you are not competitive enough to be chosen. Eligibility covers approval status, billing, account verification, budget, dates, schedule and location settings. Competitiveness covers bids and Quality Score. Remember that an “Eligible” status only means nothing is blocking you, not that you are winning. The Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool tells you which of the two you are dealing with in seconds.
Is $20 a day good for Google Ads?
It depends entirely on your click price, and the arithmetic answers it faster than any opinion. Twenty dollars a day is about six hundred a month. In a market where clicks cost five dollars, that buys a hundred and twenty clicks and a real test. Where clicks cost twenty five dollars, it buys twenty four clicks and roughly two leads in a perfect month. Same budget, completely different verdict. Work out your own click price before deciding whether the number is good.
How long should Google Ads take before it produces leads?
Clicks and enquiries can start in the first week. Stable performance takes longer, because Smart Bidding needs a body of conversion data before it makes good decisions, and Google puts the learning period at up to three weeks or one to two conversion cycles. Your conversion cycle is the gap between the click and the sale, so a long sales cycle stretches that calendar considerably. Judging a campaign at three weeks is the most common way to kill one that was about to work.
Why is Google Ads not working for my business when my competitors seem fine?
Start by working out which of the four states you are in, because a competitor comparison tells you nothing on its own. If the phone is ringing while the account shows zero, the problem is tracking, not advertising. If nothing at all is happening, look at the landing page, the match between search and message, junk traffic from missing negative keywords, and how fast anyone follows up. Competitors who look fine are usually further through the same list, not luckier.
The bottom line
Google Ads not working is four problems wearing one name. Not serving, not clicked, not converting, or working while invisible. Sixty seconds in the account tells you which one you have, and that single decision stops you fixing something that was never broken.
Most accounts KLEXA opens turn out to be in state 3 or state 4, and the owner has usually been told, sometimes for months, that they are in state 1. If you want a second pair of eyes, bring the account to a thirty minute call and we will run the triage on it properly. If the answer turns out to be the arithmetic in that last section, you will hear that too, and it costs you nothing to find out.
A niche case: crane and rigging companies in New York usually sit in state three or four, and the reasons are measurable. See why NY crane and rigging companies are burning money on generic Google Ads.