“The ads don't work” is almost never a verdict about your market. In account after account it decomposes into a short list of specific, boring leaks — most of them defaults you were opted into. Here are the six worth checking first, with the exact screen for each. You need no tool for any of this, only an evening.
1. Search terms you'd never have chosen
Keywords → Search terms
Phrase and broad match buy searches, not keywords. Sort by cost, conversions column beside it: the money is usually going to a handful of terms with zero conversions — job-seekers, students, people looking for free tools.
Fix: Add the worst offenders as negative keywords. This is the single highest-yield ten minutes in Google Ads.
2. The network boxes you never unticked
Campaign → Settings → Networks
New search campaigns opt into Search Partners and Display by default. Display clicks in particular are cheap, plentiful, and — for most service businesses — nearly worthless.
Fix: Untick both for a pure search campaign, then watch cost per conversion, not clicks.
3. Location set to 'interest', not presence
Campaign → Settings → Locations → Location options
The default targets people 'in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in' your area — which is how a Gaya plumber buys clicks from another continent.
Fix: Switch to Presence only. If you serve one city, this is not optional.
4. A conversion goal that counts the wrong thing
Goals → Conversions
If a page view or a menu click is marked as a primary conversion, Smart Bidding optimizes towards it — enthusiastically. The account 'converts' constantly and the phone never rings.
Fix: Primary = things that are money (purchase, qualified lead, booked call). Everything else secondary.
5. Bids below the first page — spending without being seen
Keywords → Columns → add 'Est. first page bid'
A keyword bidding ₹20 against a ₹25 first-page estimate isn't cheap, it's invisible — the budget drains through whatever does serve instead.
Fix: Raise the specific keywords you actually want, or pause them. A keyword you won't fund is a keyword you don't want.
6. Ads that are approved — with an asterisk
Ads & assets → Status
'Eligible (limited)' means a policy — very often a trademark in your ad text — is throttling delivery. It looks exactly like weak demand, and raising bids doesn't fix policy.
Fix: Rewrite the ad text without the trademarked term. We hit this one ourselves — full story in the previous post.
0 of 6 checked
One caution the checklists never include: don't fix everything in one sitting. Change the bleeding-worst item, give the account days to re-settle, then the next. Five simultaneous changes make the results unreadable — you'll never know which one worked.
These six are among the checks Admiral runs on every sync of a connected account — each finding priced from your own history, each fix one approval away, each approval one undo away.