Either the conversions are happening and not being recorded, or it is too early to tell, or you are buying searches that were never going to convert, or the page they land on loses them. Those four have entirely different fixes, and the order matters: the first costs a minute to check and invalidates everything below it, while the last takes a week of work. Start at the top.
Google asks for 7 to 14 days for an automated bidding strategy to ramp up, and a strategy can need around 50 conversions or three conversion cycles to calibrate. On top of that, a conversion is reported against the date of the ad interaction, not the day it happened, with a click-through window that defaults to 30 days — so the days you are staring at will keep filling in after you have made your judgement. A campaign that is three days old with four clicks has not failed; it has not started.
Count the clicks before you judge the rate: 30 clicks and no sale is normal arithmetic for most offers
Every change to budget, bids, goals, audiences or targeting can restart learning — so change one thing, then wait
Phone calls, forms sent by email and in-store visits are conversions that often never reach the account at all
Keywords are what you asked for; search terms are what you got. Google's advice is to review that report regularly and exclude what you do not sell — the example in its own documentation is adding free as a negative keyword when nothing you offer is free. It also notes what every account eventually learns: specific searches convert better than general ones, because someone typing a model number has already done the deciding. If the report is full of research questions, comparisons and jobseekers, the campaign is working perfectly and buying the wrong thing.
Google's guidance is plain: choose a landing page that closely matches the ad and the keywords, because that alignment feeds both ad relevance and landing page experience. Put the important information at the top, where it is immediately visible on arrival, and make it quick and easy to do the thing you want done. On a phone that means fast, simple navigation and an obvious way to make contact. Google also suggests keeping 3 to 5 ads in an ad group and letting the better performers take the traffic — but no ad rescues a page that answers a different question than the one that was typed.
Only once the four above are clean does the arithmetic of price deserve attention — and then the question is cost per conversion, never cost per click. A target CPA stricter than the account has ever achieved leaves few auctions worth entering; a loose one buys everything in sight. Both show up as a cost that looks wrong, and our guide to expensive clicks separates the price of attention from the quality of it. Google's own list of what moves performance has ten items; competition is one of them, and the other nine are yours.
Read the conversion action status; check the campaign against the ramp-up and the conversion window; read the search terms report and add the negatives it hands you; then take the landing page apart against the search that brought people there. Only then touch bids. Write down what you changed and when — delivery reacts with a delay, learning restarts quietly, and an account where four things changed on the same afternoon can no longer tell you which one mattered.
Accuracy check: reviewed against current Google Ads Help documentation on 7 October 2026.
Longer than most people wait. Google asks for 7 to 14 days for an automated bidding strategy to ramp up, a strategy can need around 50 conversions to calibrate, and conversions are reported against the day of the click, so a purchase today can still land on last week. Three quiet days are not evidence.
At the conversion action status, before anything else. An account that is not recording looks exactly like an account that is not converting, and the difference costs nothing to check: Unverified, No recent conversions, Recording conversions or Inactive tells you which one you have.
The search terms report shows what people actually typed. Google's own advice is to review it regularly and exclude what you do not sell — its example is adding “free” as a negative keyword when nothing you offer is free. Specific searches usually convert better than general ones.
Often it is. Google says to choose a landing page that closely matches the ad and keywords, to put the important information at the top where it is immediately visible, and to keep the mobile experience fast and easy. A click that lands on a page answering a different question is a click you paid for twice.
Not first, and not often. A conversion-based strategy with no usable conversion data has nothing to learn from, so fixing measurement comes first. After that, change one thing at a time and give it a week — every change to budget, bids, goals, audiences or targeting can restart learning.
Everything you need to run Search yourself is here. Search is also where budgets leak fastest — and the channel we are strongest in, so we can take the account from here.
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