If you are spending money on Google Ads and the enquiries are not coming, the instinct is often to increase the budget. Usually that is the wrong move. Most underperforming campaigns have structural problems that adding spend just amplifies. Here are the seven most common ones.
1. You're sending traffic to your homepage
A homepage is designed for browsing. It introduces your company, shows your work, points to multiple services. When someone clicks an ad for 'kitchen renovation contractor London' and arrives at a page with a hero image and a navigation bar, the gap between what they expected and what they found is enough to lose them.
Ad traffic needs a dedicated landing page: one message, one action, no distractions. The headline should reflect what the search was for. Everything on the page should serve that one conversion goal.
2. Your keywords are too broad
Broad match keywords attract a wide range of searches, including many that have no buying intent. 'Renovation ideas' and 'how to renovate a bathroom yourself' and 'renovation cost calculator' can all trigger broad match keywords that sound relevant. But the people searching those terms are not looking to hire you.
High-intent searches look like 'kitchen renovation contractor near me' or 'bathroom renovation company London'. Those are the searches worth paying for.
3. Conversion tracking is not set up properly
Without accurate conversion tracking, Google's algorithm does not know which clicks led to real enquiries. It will optimise for whatever it can measure, which might be nothing useful. Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Maximise Conversions rely entirely on conversion data. Feed them bad data or no data and they will not work.
This is the most expensive mistake in Google Ads. You can waste months of budget optimising for the wrong outcome.
4. Your ad copy doesn't filter for the right client
Ads that appeal to everyone often convert no one useful. If your renovation business focuses on high-value projects, not including pricing signals in your ads attracts enquiries from people whose budget does not match yours. A line like 'Projects from £50,000' filters out the wrong enquiries before they even click, which actually reduces your cost per qualified lead even if it reduces total clicks.
5. You're not using negative keywords
Negative keywords tell Google which searches should never trigger your ads. Without a robust negative keyword list, your ads will show for terms that are clearly not buyers: 'how to renovate a bathroom DIY', 'free renovation grant', 'renovation ideas on a budget', 'renovation TV show'.
Building and maintaining the negative keyword list is ongoing work, not a one-time setup. Every week of data reveals more irrelevant terms to exclude.
6. The page is too slow
Page speed affects conversion rate directly: faster pages convert better. It also affects your Google Ads Quality Score, which determines both how often your ads show and how much you pay per click. A slow landing page costs you twice: fewer conversions from the visitors who do arrive, and a higher cost per click for every one of them.
7. The campaign structure doesn't match the objective
Google's Smart Bidding strategies need a minimum amount of conversion data before they can optimise effectively. A campaign that is too fragmented across too many ad groups, or that was launched with the wrong bidding strategy, may never reach that threshold.
The right structure depends on your budget, your market, and your conversion volume. A campaign that works for a business spending £5,000 per month will be structured differently from one spending £1,000.
The fix is rarely to spend more
Most of these problems are structural. They need to be fixed, not funded around. If you are running Google Ads and not seeing returns, the first step is an audit of what is actually happening: where the traffic is coming from, where it is going, and what it is doing when it gets there.
If you would like to understand whether your campaigns have fixable structural issues, get in touch. All Colonnade campaigns are built from scratch with the right structure, proper conversion tracking, and a dedicated landing page built to convert the traffic.
Your campaign might have a fixable structural problem.
Every Colonnade Google Ads campaign is built with the right structure, accurate conversion tracking, and a landing page built to convert the traffic it receives.