Google Ads · 14 August 2026
Why your Google Ads get clicks but no enquiries
Three causes account for most of it, and all three are visible in reports you already have access to.
An account can look healthy and still lose money every month. Impressions are fine, the click-through rate is respectable, the cost per click looks reasonable — and the inbox stays empty. When that happens, the cause is nearly always one of three things.
Broad match with no negative keywords
Broad match lets Google spend your budget on anything loosely related to what you sell. Without a maintained negative keyword list, that includes people looking for jobs, definitions, free alternatives and how-to guides.
Open your search terms report and sort by cost. Read the actual phrases people typed. On most untouched accounts, a meaningful share of spend has gone to searches that were never going to result in a sale.
Conversion tracking that counts the wrong thing
A great many accounts count a page visit, a scroll, or a button hover as a conversion. When that happens, Google optimises towards people who visit pages rather than people who enquire, and every report you read afterwards is fiction.
Check what your conversion actions actually fire on. If the count looks suspiciously high next to the enquiries you remember receiving, this is why.
Landing pages that answer the wrong question
A campaign about a specific service sending everyone to the homepage asks the visitor to find their own way. Most will not. The page someone lands on should answer the search they made, not describe the whole business.
Where to start
Fix the tracking first. Optimising a landing page while conversion data is wrong tells you nothing about whether the change helped, and you will end up making decisions on numbers that were never real.
Written by Buddhika Kasun Karunathilaka, WireCabin (PVT) LTD. SEO services · More posts