Why your Google Ads
"aren't doing anything."

"I have paid Google Ads, but I don't think they're doing anything." A business owner said that to me recently, and if you've ever run ads for your own business, you've probably said it too, quietly, to yourself, while paying the invoice anyway. Here's the uncomfortable truth behind it: the ads probably are doing something. They're spending your money on things you'd never have chosen. You just can't see it, because the settings responsible are switched on by default, buried three menus deep, and described in language designed to sound helpful.

I know because I recently tore down and rebuilt a Google Ads account with exactly this complaint, and found every single one of the four culprits below, live and spending. So this isn't theory. It's a checklist from the trenches, and you can run it on your own account in about ten minutes.

When a small business sets up Google Ads for the first time, Google steers you into what it calls a Smart campaign. It sounds ideal: Google handles everything, you just set a budget. What it actually means is that you have no keyword control, no visibility of what searches trigger your ads, and no say in where they appear. In the account I rebuilt, a Smart campaign was buying clicks at six pence each. That sounds like a bargain until you know that a genuine click from someone searching for that business's service costs two to four pounds. Six pence buys the leftovers: vague searches, random placements, people who will never become customers. The campaign was technically "working" every single day. It just wasn't doing anything.

Even in a proper Search campaign, two boxes come pre-ticked: the Display Network and "search partners." Translated, that means your ads can appear on random websites, in apps, and on search engines that aren't Google, places where nobody is actively looking for what you do. These placements deliver impressively large numbers of impressions and impressively cheap clicks, which is exactly why they're on by default. Volume looks like success in a report. It just doesn't pay any invoices.

You might have entered a sensible keyword like "garden rooms suffolk." But unless you told it otherwise, Google treats that as broad match, meaning it can show your ad for anything it considers related. Related, in Google's generous interpretation, includes "garden shed cheap," "how to build a garden room yourself," and "garden room jobs." On top of that, newer accounts get AI-powered keyword expansion switched on, which widens the net further still, automatically, forever. When I audited that rebuilt account, a search for a very specific local service was being matched to a keyword the owner never added: plain "online marketing." Google had helpfully suggested it during setup, pre-ticked, and it rode along unnoticed.

Set your ads to show in Suffolk, and you'd reasonably assume they show to people in Suffolk. Google's default is subtly different: people in, or who have shown interest in, your location. That second clause is how a plumber in Ipswich ends up paying for clicks from someone in Manchester who once searched for a hotel on the Suffolk coast. For any local service business, it's money quietly leaving the county.

There's a fifth problem underneath the other four: most small business accounts have no working conversion tracking. Nothing tells Google, or you, when a click becomes an enquiry. Without that, the account reports clicks and impressions, numbers that always look like something, while the only number that matters, enquiries, lives in your inbox where the ads platform can't see it. That's how an account runs for a year "doing fine" while doing nothing. If you fix the four settings above and set up even basic conversion tracking, you stop guessing entirely.

For a local service business, it isn't complicated: one Search campaign, search results only, a shortlist of keywords in quotes and brackets that a real customer would type, presence-only location targeting, a list of negative keywords (jobs, free, courses, the usual suspects), and ads that land on a page about the thing the person searched for, not your homepage. A modest daily budget run that tightly will quietly outperform triple the spend run on defaults. Then one habit: ten minutes a week in the search terms report, turning anything irrelevant into a new negative keyword. That habit is the whole game.

You can do all of this yourself. Genuinely, the checks above require no expertise, just the willingness to click into settings Google would rather you left alone. If you run the audit and everything's clean, wonderful, you've spent ten minutes buying peace of mind. If you find two or three of these culprits live in your account, you have a decision: fix it yourself with the instructions above, or have someone do it properly while you run your business. We're obviously one option for that. But either way, stop paying for defaults. You deserve to know what your money is doing.