Check what the campaign is allowed to bid on before you touch the traffic. A campaign spending thousands with zero conversions is far more often pointed at the wrong goal, or at a broken tag, than buying bad traffic.

On this page

• What should I check first when a campaign spends with no conversions?
• What setup error most often causes zero conversions?
• How do I build conversion history when I have none?

What should I check first when a campaign spends with no conversions?

Stop at the first gate that fails. Do not do all six at once.

1. Is the conversion firing at all? Place a test order or submit the form yourself. If nothing records, nothing downstream matters. This takes five minutes and resolves a large share of these.

2. What is the campaign actually bidding on? Not what the account-level flags say — what the campaign's goal configuration says. A conversion action set to secondary still bids if it sits inside a custom goal, and a campaign-level custom goal overrides account-level primary flags completely. Pull the campaign conversion goals and filter to biddable.

3. Is it bidding on conversions at all? Some campaign types do not. A Google Smart Campaign bids on TARGET_SPEND, which is Maximize Clicks. It is not optimising toward any conversion outcome, it has no keyword control, no search-term report, and no way to exclude Display. Verified on an electrical contractor's account, August 2026. If that is what you are running, zero conversions is the design, not a fault.

4. Is the bid strategy able to work at this volume? Smart Bidding on a goal with almost no history predicts near-zero value, so it bids near-zero, so it never serves, so it never earns history. That loop does not break on its own.

5. Now look at the traffic. Search terms, match types, geography.

6. Then the page. Covered separately.

What setup error most often causes zero conversions?

The campaign is optimising toward an action that almost never happens — a rarely-completed form, a deprecated action, or an action that stopped firing after a site change and nobody noticed.

Check when the action last recorded a conversion. If the answer is "weeks ago," the bidder has been flying blind that long.

How do I build conversion history when I have none?

Use Maximize Clicks with a cost-per-click ceiling as a discovery instrument. It manufactures the conversion history that value bidding needs, at a price you control. Then graduate to a value strategy once you clear a pre-registered volume gate.

But cap it. Uncapped Maximize Clicks will bid whatever it takes to spend the budget. On a thin exact-match keyword pool it has nowhere cheap to go. Measured on a software affiliate account over 12 days from launch: cost per click ran $2.17 → $15.91 on one arm and $1.62 → $6.04 on another. All four arms breached their pre-registered kill triggers by 2.2× to 5.1×.

Related questions

Half the calls I get from Google Ads are junk — is that normal for a plumbing business, or is my tracking set up wrong?

Some junk is normal, but half is a targeting and goal problem rather than a fact of the industry. The most common cause is that the account is optimising toward calls rather than toward booked jobs. Read the full answer.

I'm getting clicks from Google Ads but no conversions. Is it the traffic or my landing page?

You cannot tell from the account-level number, and almost every published answer tells you to fix both at once. Segment conversion rate by search-term intent instead. Read the full answer.

How do I work out what target ROAS to actually set for my store?

Derive it from contribution margin and your fixed per-order costs, not from a benchmark. The formula everyone uses — 1 ÷ gross margin — is a breakeven floor, not a target, and it ignores the per-order costs that decide whether an order is actually worth having. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Last reviewed 2026-08-26.