Nearly every “my Google Ads aren’t converting” conversation I have turns out to be the wrong diagnosis.
The ads are usually fine. The copy is fine. The bidding is fine. What’s broken is a setting somebody accepted three years ago during setup, which has been quietly spending money in the wrong city, on the wrong queries, and counting the wrong thing as a win ever since.
So before you rewrite a single headline, spend forty minutes on this.
Here are the six places the money actually leaks, in the order I check them. Five are settings you can fix this morning. The sixth is your landing page, which is the only one that needs real work. Two of these levers only became available this year, so even a well-run account is probably leaving them switched off.
1. The search terms report, which nobody opens
Start here. Always here.
Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms. You want the last 90 days, sorted by cost, with conversions in view.
Read down the list and ask one question of each row: would I pay for this again? Most people find something absurd inside two minutes. A dental clinic paying for “dental jobs salary”. A B2B software company paying for “free” variants of their own category. A packers and movers firm in Whitefield paying for people looking for jobs as packers.
Every row that makes you wince becomes a negative keyword. This one report, read properly once a month, is worth more than any bid strategy change you will ever make.
Now, the trap. Google shows you a filtered subset of terms, not everything, so a chunk of spend sits in rows you cannot see. That’s a reason to check more often, not a reason to skip it.
2. You are almost certainly paying for the wrong city
This is the single most expensive default in Google Ads, and it catches local businesses hardest.
Every new campaign defaults to targeting “presence or interest”, which means Google shows your ads to people who are physically in your target location AND to people who merely showed interest in it. Someone sitting in Delhi reading about Bengaluru counts as interest.
For a national ecommerce brand, fine. For a dentist in Koramangala, a gym in HSR or a chartered accountant in Andheri, you are buying clicks from people who will never walk in.
Campaign, then Settings, then Locations, then expand Location options. Change it from “Presence or interest” to “Presence”. Google’s own help documentation is clear that this is the default and that you have to change it by hand.
Do it on every campaign. It takes about ninety seconds each and it is the highest return ninety seconds in this entire post.
3. Performance Max is eating your brand searches and billing you for them
Here’s the pattern. PMax launches, conversions jump, everyone is delighted, and nobody notices that the campaign started serving on people searching your company name.
Those people were going to find you anyway. You are now paying for them, and PMax is claiming the credit, which makes it look like your best performing campaign while your actual prospecting quietly starves.
Two fixes, and they’re separate things that people mix up.
Brand exclusions live in the campaign’s brand settings, and Google made these self-serve at the end of 2024 rather than something you had to ask a rep for. Switch your own brand off in PMax and watch what happens to the numbers over a fortnight.
Account-level negative keyword lists are the other lever, and they matter because PMax does not accept campaign-level negative keyword lists through the normal interface. Account level is the reliable way to block a query across everything, PMax included.
If your conversions drop sharply after excluding brand, that is not a disaster. That is you finding out what you were actually buying.
4. Your conversion action is counting something that isn’t a sale
Open Goals, then Conversions, then look at the Summary. For each action, check two columns: whether it’s set to “Include in Conversions”, and whether it counts Every conversion or One.
The usual mess looks like this. Someone set up a conversion for a thank-you page view, another for a phone number click, another for a newsletter signup, and all three are switched on and weighted equally. So a person who idly clicked your phone number and never dialled counts the same as a Rs 2 lakh order.
Then bidding optimises towards the cheapest of the three. Which is the newsletter. Which is why your cost per conversion looks wonderful and your bank balance doesn’t.
Pick the one action that means money. Everything else becomes a secondary conversion, tracked but excluded from bidding.
While you’re in there, set “count” to One for lead generation. Otherwise the same person filling your form on three devices reads as three leads, and you spend the next quarter chasing a number that never existed.
I wrote yesterday about why the conversion figure itself is partly modelled and cannot be fully taken apart. Worth reading alongside this, because it explains why you reconcile against your CRM rather than trusting the dashboard.
5. The two levers that only appeared this year
Google shipped two things in the first quarter of 2026 that most accounts have not touched.
In January, account-level placement exclusions started applying across campaigns, Performance Max included. Before this, stopping your ads appearing on a junk mobile game or a scraped content farm was a campaign-by-campaign chore, and largely impossible inside PMax. Now you build one exclusion list and it holds everywhere.
In February, the “when and where ads showed” report expanded for Performance Max, and now surfaces Search Partner Network placements too. So you can finally see more of where the money went.
Pull that report. Sort by impressions. If a meaningful slice of your budget went somewhere you’d be embarrassed to show a client, add it to the account-level exclusion list.
While you have the campaign settings open, glance at the ad schedule as well. Plenty of Indian service businesses run ads round the clock and answer the phone from 10 to 7.
6. The landing page is asking for too much
This is the one that isn’t a setting, and it’s usually the real problem once the first five are clean.
Look at your form. Count the fields.
If someone searching “emergency plumber Indiranagar” at 9pm has to supply name, email, phone, company, city, budget range and a message before anything happens, you built a form for your CRM’s convenience, not theirs. Name and phone is enough. You can ask the rest on the call.
And give people the channel they actually use. A prominent WhatsApp button converts better than a form for most local service businesses in India, by a margin that surprises people the first time they test it.
Match the page to the promise, too. If the ad says same-day service, the words “same day” should appear above the fold. A click that lands on a generic homepage is a click you paid full price to waste.
Before lunch
Do them in order. Search terms, then location setting, then brand exclusions, then the conversion action.
That’s four checks, maybe forty minutes, and in most accounts I open it recovers somewhere between a fifth and a third of the spend without touching a single bid.
If it’s still not converting after all six are clean, then you have a genuine strategy problem, and my notes on performance marketing go into what I’d look at next. But check the settings first. It’s nearly always the settings.