Google Ads Not Working? How to Diagnose and Fix It

When people say Google Ads "isn't working," it's usually one of five things: ads aren't serving at all (billing, disapproval, or budget), they're serving to the wrong searches, the landing page or phone can't convert the traffic, conversion tracking is broken so real results never show in the account, or the budget is too small to buy enough clicks to learn anything. The fix starts with finding out which one it is — in that order, because a tracking problem looks identical to a performance problem in the reports.

This guide walks through each failure mode with the exact screens and settings to check, including the "Destination not working" disapproval and the Shopify conversion tracking problems that cause the most confusion.

Are Google Ads not working today, or is it just my account?

Platform-wide Google Ads outages are rare and usually resolve in under an hour. Check the Google Ads Status Dashboard first — if everything there is green, the problem is in your account, not Google's.

When ads stopped serving "today" and nothing was changed, these are the usual culprits, in the order we check them:

• Billing failure. A declined card or an expired payment method pauses the whole account. Look for the red banner at the top of the Google Ads interface and check Billing > Summary.
• Campaign end date passed. Someone set an end date months ago and forgot. Campaign settings > Start and end dates.
• Budget exhausted early. If your daily budget burns out by 11am, your ads literally are not working for the rest of the day. Check the hourly impression curve under Reports > Time > Hour of day.
• A policy sweep disapproved your ads. Disapprovals happen in batches; one flagged phrase can knock out every ad in an ad group.
• An automated rule or script paused things. Tools > Bulk actions > Rules shows the run history.
• Account suspension. Usually tied to a business verification or payment issue, and it kills all serving at once.

If the change log (Tools > Change history, filtered to the last 7 days) shows a bid strategy or budget edit right before the drop, you've found it. We've seen a single switch from Maximize clicks to Target CPA cut impressions by 80% overnight because the target was set below the market's average cost per click.

Why do my ads say "Eligible" but get no impressions?

"Eligible" only means the ad is approved and the campaign is active. It does not mean the ad is competitive enough to enter an auction.

Work down this list:

• Bids too low. Check Search impression share lost (rank). Above 80% means you're losing almost every auction on bid or Quality Score.
• Target CPA or ROAS set unrealistically. In our accounts, a tCPA under roughly 2x the average CPC in that market throttles delivery close to zero. If clicks cost $18 and your tCPA is $25, the system often chooses not to bid.
• Location settings. A 5-mile radius in a rural area may have almost no search volume. Also check whether the campaign is set to "Presence" or "Presence or interest" — the narrow setting is correct for local service businesses but cuts reach.
• Audience set to "Targeting" instead of "Observation." This silently restricts the campaign to a small remarketing list.
• Negative keyword conflicts. A shared negative list containing a broad term like "service" or "free" can block your own keywords. The Diagnostics tab flags conflicts.
• Low search volume keywords. Exact-match long-tail keywords get paused by Google automatically when volume is too low.
• Ad schedule. Business-hours-only schedules are fine, but combined with a small budget they can mean almost no serving.

If you're running Performance Max and impressions dried up, check whether the asset group has enough assets and whether the listing group or feed is still active — a Merchant Center feed disapproval will stop a Shopping-heavy PMax campaign cold.

What does "Destination not working" mean in Google Ads?

"Destination not working" is a disapproval that means Google's crawler (AdsBot) tried to load your final URL and couldn't — or got something different from what a user would see. Under Google's destination requirements policy, the landing page has to be reachable, functional, and consistent with the display URL.

The most common real-world causes, roughly in order of frequency:

1. robots.txt blocks AdsBot. After a site migration, staging rules often carry over. AdsBot-Google ignores a generic User-agent: * disallow, but an explicit User-agent: AdsBot-Google / Disallow: / will break every ad. Check both AdsBot-Google and AdsBot-Google-Mobile.
2. A firewall or bot protection is blocking the crawl. Cloudflare bot modes, Wordfence, and aggressive rate limiting all do this. The page loads fine for you and returns a 403 for AdsBot.
3. An expired SSL certificate or a mixed-content warning.
4. 404 or 500 errors on a page that was renamed or deleted, including old UTM-laden URLs with tracking parameters that break routing.
5. Geo-blocking. If your site blocks traffic outside one country or region, Google's crawlers may be refused.
6. Domain mismatch between display URL and final URL. If the final URL redirects to a different domain, that's a disapproval, not a soft warning.
7. Maintenance mode, "coming soon" plugins, age gates, or interstitials that appear before the content.
8. Slow pages or timeouts — if the server takes too long to respond, the crawl fails.

How to fix a destination not working disapproval

Open the final URL in an incognito window on mobile data, not your office Wi-Fi — that rules out IP whitelisting. Then pull up yourdomain.com/robots.txt and search for AdsBot. Temporarily set bot protection to its lowest setting and re-test. Confirm the redirect chain: one redirect is fine, four is a problem.

Once it's genuinely fixed, edit and save the ad (even a one-character change) to trigger a fresh review. In our experience re-reviews complete in a few hours to two business days. Appealing without fixing anything just restarts the clock.

Why is Google Ads conversion tracking not working?

If clicks and calls are happening but the Conversions column shows zero, the ads may be working fine and the measurement is broken. This matters more than it sounds: Smart Bidding feeds on conversion data, so broken tracking actively degrades performance within a week or two.

Check these, in order:

• Is the Google tag on the conversion page at all? Use the Diagnostics tab inside the conversion action, or Tools > Google tag > Tag coverage.
• Auto-tagging off. Without the GCLID parameter, Google can't connect a conversion back to a click. Settings > Account settings > Auto-tagging should be on.
• Cookie consent banners. With Consent Mode v2 configured incorrectly, tags fire in "denied" state and conversions never land. This is the single most common cause we see on EU-style banners deployed on North American sites.
• Cross-domain loss. Booking widgets, scheduling tools, and third-party checkouts on another domain drop the GCLID unless cross-domain linking is set up in the Google tag.
• Conversion action marked "Secondary." Secondary actions report but do not feed bidding, and they don't appear in the main Conversions column.
• Event snippet missing on a single-page app. React, Vue, and Webflow-style sites don't reload on a thank-you "page," so the conversion event never fires.
• Conversion window too short for a long sales cycle. The default is 30 days; B2B often needs 60–90.
• Phone calls not counted. Calls from call assets are tracked automatically; calls to a number on your website need the call reporting tag and a Google forwarding number.

A fast test: click one of your own ads, complete the form, and check the conversion action in 3–6 hours. Google reports conversions on a delay, so "nothing yet" after 20 minutes is not evidence of failure.

Shopify Google Ads conversion tracking not working

On Shopify, three specific issues cause most of the trouble.

First, checkout scripts moved. Shopify now handles checkout and order-status tracking through Customer Events (web pixels) rather than the old Additional Scripts box, so legacy manually-pasted conversion snippets quietly stopped firing for many stores. Shopify's Google & YouTube channel documentation covers the supported setup.

Second, double counting. If the Google & YouTube app is installed and someone added a manual purchase tag, you'll see conversions at roughly 2x and inflated revenue. Smart Bidding then over-spends against phantom ROAS. Audit under Settings > Customer events and in the app's tag settings.

Third, currency and value mismatches. A Canadian store reporting CAD values into an account set to USD will look far more profitable than it is. Check the conversion action's value settings against your store currency.

The clean test is a real $1 test product: buy it, refund it, and confirm exactly one purchase conversion with the correct value appears. If the number you report in Google Ads doesn't match Shopify's order count within about 5–10%, keep digging before judging campaign performance or your landing page conversion rate.

Symptom-to-cause table

Symptom	Most likely cause	Where to check
Zero impressions since yesterday	Billing decline or end date	Billing summary; campaign settings
"Eligible" but no impressions	Bid or tCPA too low; audience set to Targeting	Impression share lost (rank)
Ads disapproved: Destination not working	robots.txt, firewall, SSL, redirect	robots.txt; incognito on mobile data
Clicks but zero conversions	Tag missing, consent blocking, cross-domain loss	Conversion action Diagnostics tab
Conversions roughly double real orders	Duplicate Shopify tags	Settings > Customer events
Spend climbing, leads irrelevant	Broad match without negatives	Search terms report
Budget gone by mid-morning	Broad keywords or too-wide geo	Hour-of-day report
Calls happen, none recorded	No call reporting tag	Conversions > Calls from website

Why are dental Google Ads not working?

Dental campaigns rarely fail on keywords. They fail on budget math, the search terms report, and what happens after the click.

Clicks on terms like "dental implants near me" commonly run $15–$40 in US metros, and emergency dentist terms can be higher. At $1,000 a month, that's 25–60 clicks total. If 1 in 10 books, you get 3–6 new patients — which may be profitable, but it's far too little data to conclude anything after three weeks.

The other recurring issues:

• Broad match with no negatives. Dental accounts bleed money on "dental assistant jobs," "free dental clinic," "dental school," "dental insurance." Building a disciplined negative keyword strategy is usually the single biggest cost saver.
• Traffic sent to the homepage. A visitor searching "invisalign cost" wants a price range and a booking button, not a practice history page.
• Missed calls. Paid clicks on service queries convert heavily by phone. If the front desk is with a patient, that lead is gone. This is the quiet killer in most local campaigns.
• Radius too wide. Nobody drives 25 miles for a cleaning. Tighten to realistic drive times and bid higher inside them.
• Competing with aggregators that bid on every dentist term in the city with far larger budgets.

The same pattern holds for other appointment-based businesses — see our breakdown of Google Ads for a medical practice and the Downtown Dentists project for what the fixed version looks like.

How long should Google Ads run before you judge it?

Give a properly-tracked search campaign at least 90 days and enough budget to generate roughly 30 conversions per month if you want Smart Bidding to do its job. Below that, you're making decisions on noise.

Reasonable checkpoints:

1. Days 1–7: confirm serving, approvals, and that conversions are recording. Don't touch bids.
2. Days 8–21: mine the search terms report twice a week and add negatives. Expect waste in week one; that's normal with broad match.
3. Days 22–45: judge cost per lead, not cost per click. Fix the landing page before touching the bid strategy.
4. Days 46–90: evaluate closed revenue, not form fills. If 40 leads produced two jobs, the problem is lead quality or follow-up speed, not Google.

Changing bid strategies every ten days resets learning and guarantees mediocre results. Pick one, fund it, and leave it alone.

What if the ads work but the business doesn't get the leads?

This is more common than broken tags. Ads deliver, the phone rings, and nobody picks up — or a form comes in Friday at 4pm and gets a reply Monday morning.

Three places to look:

• Answer rate. Pull the call recordings in your Google Ads call reporting or call tracking tool and count unanswered calls. In the local accounts we audit, it's routinely 20–35% during business hours.
• Response time. Leads contacted within 5 minutes convert dramatically better than those contacted the next day. An automated text-back is cheap insurance.
• Follow-up count. Most businesses try once. Two or three touches over 48 hours typically recovers a meaningful share of leads.

If you've confirmed serving, approvals, and tracking and performance still doesn't move, the next step is a structural review of the account and the funnel it feeds. That's the work our Google Ads management team at Lead Key Agency does on takeovers: fix the measurement first, then the targeting, then the landing page, in that order.

A 30-minute self-diagnostic

1. Check the Google Ads Status Dashboard for a live incident.
2. Look for a red billing banner and confirm the payment method is valid.
3. Open Change history for the last 14 days and look for bid, budget, or targeting edits.
4. Filter ads by "Disapproved" and read the exact policy reason.
5. Load your final URL in incognito on mobile data and check robots.txt for AdsBot rules.
6. Check Search impression share lost (rank) and (budget) at campaign level.
7. Open each conversion action and read the Diagnostics tab.
8. Confirm auto-tagging is on and the conversion window matches your sales cycle.
9. Run a live test conversion and verify it appears within 6 hours.
10. Download the last 30 days of search terms and highlight everything irrelevant.
11. Count the leads you received against the conversions reported — if they disagree, trust the leads.

Nine times out of ten, the answer is in those eleven steps. If it isn't, the issue is usually budget size or offer strength, and no amount of account tinkering fixes either.

If you'd rather have someone else run the diagnosis, book a free 30-minute strategy call and we'll walk through your account live and tell you what's actually broken — tracking, targeting, or the page the clicks land on.