When an account produces traffic but no enquiries, the budget is almost never the problem. Something between the search and the phone ringing is broken, and it is usually one of these.

1. You are paying for the wrong searches

Broad match without a serious negative keyword list will spend your money on people looking for jobs, free advice, DIY instructions and your competitors by name. The first thing we do on any audit is pull the search terms report and read what people actually typed. It is often uncomfortable reading.

2. The ad does not match the landing page

If the ad promises emergency boiler repair and the click lands on a general homepage, the visitor has to work out where to go next. Most will not. Every ad group should point at a page about that one thing.

3. Conversions are counting the wrong event

An account optimising toward page views will faithfully find you people who look and leave. Conversions should be form submissions and calls, deduplicated, with spam filtered out. Until that is right, every other optimisation is guesswork.

4. Performance Max is running without signals

Performance Max works when it has clean conversion data and clear audience signals. Switched on without them, it will find the cheapest clicks available, which are rarely the valuable ones.

5. Nobody answers the phone

This sounds obvious. It is also the single most common cause we find. Ads run at hours nobody is available, calls go to voicemail, and the enquiry goes to whoever picks up next.

6. The page is slow on a phone

Most paid clicks in New York happen on mobile, often on a busy network. A landing page carrying several megabytes loses a meaningful share of visitors before it renders.