Week one, 11 leads. Week two, nothing. You haven’t touched a setting, the budget’s the same, and the phone has gone quiet.
It’s one of the most common “Google Ads isn’t working” stories I hear from Bay of Plenty business owners, and the ads are rarely the first thing that’s wrong. So here’s the Google Ads checklist I’d run before any campaign goes live. Four things, none of them glamorous, all of them cheap to fix before launch and expensive to fix after.
Why week two is the one that tells you the truth
Week one is a small sample. Eleven leads can be a good keyword, a lucky Tuesday, or people who were already about to ring you. Week two is where the plumbing shows itself: a form that stopped sending, a phone number that changed, a page that doesn’t match the ad.
When the leads dry up, most owners blame the ads, because the ads are the part they can see. Pause the campaign, rewrite the headlines, change agency. Meanwhile the real problem is sitting untouched, and it’ll break the next campaign too.
Google Ads checklist, item one: tracking you’ve tested yourself
Conversion tracking is the setting that tells Google what counts as a win: a form sent, a call made, a purchase completed. Without it, Google can’t learn which clicks turn into customers, and you can’t tell a good week from a bad one.
Having tracking installed isn’t the same as having tracking that works. So test it like a customer would:
- Fill in your own contact form with a fake enquiry and see whether it shows up as a conversion.
- Ring the number on your ad from your mobile and check the call is recorded.
- If you sell online, put something in the cart and buy it. Then refund yourself.
Give it a few hours to appear, then look. If nothing shows, you’ve just saved yourself a month of spending blind.
This is also the only reason I can say anything useful about results. Dog Training Solutions, a Bay of Plenty ecommerce store, turned $1,817.77 of Google Ads spend into $8,653.84 of conversion value between May and July 2026, a 4.8x return. That number only exists because every purchase is tracked back to the click that started it.
Item two: a landing page with one job
The landing page is the page someone arrives on after clicking your ad. It has one job: get them to enquire. Open it on your phone, because plenty of your clicks will land there, and run through this:
- Does the headline say what the ad said? If the ad promised “same-week roof repairs” and the page opens with “Welcome to our company”, you’ve lost them.
- Is the phone number tappable, and visible without scrolling?
- Does the form actually send, and does it send to an inbox someone reads?
- Is it fast? If it takes more than a few seconds to load on mobile data, people leave.
- Are the menu links and footer clutter getting in the way? Every extra link is another way out.
Sending ad clicks to your homepage is a common shortcut, and it tends to cost you. A homepage has to serve everyone. A landing page only has to serve the person who just clicked.
Item three: someone answers, quickly
This is the one nobody puts on a checklist, and it’s where a lot of ad money quietly leaks. A lead who rings and gets voicemail, or who fills in a form and hears nothing for a day, has already tried the next business on the list.
Decide before launch:
- Who picks up the phone, and what happens when they’re on a job or on the tools?
- Who reads the form notifications, and how fast do they reply?
- What does the person hear if nobody answers? A clear voicemail message that promises a call back beats a ring-out.
- Do your ad hours match your answering hours? If nobody’s there at 7pm, there’s a case for not paying for clicks at 7pm.
You don’t need a call centre. You need a named person and an agreed time, even if it’s “within the hour during business hours”.
Item four: a stop rule, written down before you spend
Cost per lead is simply what one enquiry costs you: your ad spend divided by the number of leads. A stop rule is two decisions made while you’re calm:
- The cost per lead you’d happily accept. Work backwards from what a customer is worth to you, and how many leads it takes to land one.
- The date you’ll judge the campaign, and it isn’t day three. Google Ads needs time and data to settle, so a few weeks is a fairer test than a few days.
Budget belongs here too. If your daily budget is so small that you’ll only get a handful of clicks a week, there’s not enough data to learn from, and no rule can save it. Better to know that before you launch than to find out in week six.
Write both decisions down. Future you, staring at a quiet Thursday, will want to change everything. The note stops that.
Run it again whenever something changes
Campaigns rarely break on their own. They break when something around them changes: a website update, a new plugin, a redesigned page, a swapped phone number, a form moved to a new email address. Any of those can quietly kill your tracking or your form, and nothing will warn you.
So the checklist isn’t a one-off. It’s a five-minute check after every change to the site, and it’s the work that sits behind Google Ads management done properly, rather than a campaign that’s launched and left.
Ads get the blame because they’re the part you can see. The tracking, the page, the phone and the rule are the parts that decide whether the ads get a fair go.