Self-managed, 23 weeks
0 enquiries
A new-build development ran Google Ads for five months and recorded not one enquiry. The ads were not the problem. Nothing was ever counting.
A four-unit development with homes priced from £460,000. The campaign was live, approved and spending. It had simply never produced a measurable enquiry.
Account opened and a Performance Max campaign goes live, self-managed, with a £66/day budget approved.
Twenty-three weeks of continuous running. 17,388 impressions, 1,190 clicks, zero enquiries recorded. Total spend across the whole period: £88, under 1% of the approved budget.
The account is audited properly for the first time. The cause is found the same day, and it is not the ads. (Page 4.)
Tracking fixed and verified firing end to end. Campaign rebuilt from Performance Max to Search and switched back on at £20/day.
Every week since the rebuild has produced at least one enquiry. There has not been a single blank week.
*Enquiries are register-interest form submissions, phone-number clicks and calls placed from the ad. Figures pulled directly from the Google Ads API on 10 September 2026. The final week shown is partial, to 10 September.
Five months of an apparently healthy campaign, throttling itself to a standstill because it was never told what a good outcome looked like.
The only conversion actions set up were page-view type, one of them pointed at a same-page contact anchor that never loads a page and therefore can never fire.
The campaign bid on Maximize Conversions. With no conversion ever recorded, the bidding had no signal to optimise towards, so it throttled delivery to almost nothing: £88 spent against a £66/day budget in five months.
Two real conversion actions built, installed on the site and verified firing end to end before a penny more was spent.
Targeting: a 50-mile radius sat on top of six named towns. Google adds locations together rather than narrowing them, so the town list was decorative and the ads were reaching most of Greater London.
Ad copy: the ads advertised a three-bedroom home. The development has never had one. Copy rewritten against the real, currently available units.
Assets: the campaign had no sitelinks, callouts, call button or snippets at all. Sixteen added.
Structure: rebuilt from Performance Max to Search. Performance Max needs roughly 30 to 50 conversions a month to learn properly. A four-unit development on a small budget can never feed it.
The honest comparison. The old campaign barely spent anything, because it had throttled itself. This is not the same money buying more. It is a budget that was never actually being used starting to work.
| Period | Spend | Clicks | Enquiries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-managed PMax | £88 | 1,190 | 0 |
| Rebuilt Search | £815 | 400 | 10 |
A third of the clicks, and every one of the enquiries. The rebuilt campaign buys far less traffic, and far more of the right traffic.
On a high-value, low-volume product, the maths stops being about cost per lead very quickly.
Broken conversion tracking does not look broken. The campaign stays live, the reports keep arriving, and the budget quietly stops working. It is the most common thing found in a first audit.
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