When paid search stops working, check these six things

Paid search rarely dies all at once. It erodes. The cost per lead creeps up over a few weeks, the volume drifts down, and by the time someone flags it in a meeting the account has already been underperforming for a month. The frustrating part is that the dashboard often looks fine. Impressions are up, clicks are steady, the click-through rate is roughly what it was. Something further down the funnel broke, and the top-level numbers hid it.

When a Google or Microsoft Ads account stops producing, the instinct is to change bids or throw money at it. That usually makes things worse. Before you touch a single bid, work through these six checks in order. They move from the most common cause to the least, so you find the problem faster.

1. Check the search terms report, not the keyword list

Your keywords are what you told Google you want. The search terms report is what people actually typed. On broad match and phrase match, those two lists diverge over time, and the gap is where money leaks.

Pull the last 30 days of search terms and sort by cost. You are looking for queries that spent real money and produced nothing:

• Informational queries ("how to fix", "is it worth it", "diy") that will not convert for a paid service.
• Job seekers ("careers", "salary", "hiring") clicking your ads.
• Competitor and adjacent-product terms that Google decided were "close enough".
• Wrong-intent variants: someone selling commercial HVAC paying for residential searches.

Add negative keywords for the losers. This single step recovers more wasted spend than any bid change, and it is the first thing that degrades when an account runs on autopilot for a few months.

2. Confirm conversion tracking is actually firing

If your paid search "stopped working" the same week the numbers cratered, suspect the tracking before you suspect the market. A tag breaks quietly. A developer ships a new thank-you page and the conversion pixel does not come with it. The form vendor changes how the submit event fires. Google keeps optimizing toward conversions it can no longer see, so it spends into silence.

Test it yourself. Submit the form. Complete a test purchase if you can refund it. Then check that the conversion appears in the ads platform within the expected window (usually a day, sometimes less). Do not trust that it worked six months ago.

A campaign optimizing toward a broken conversion tag will happily spend your whole budget teaching itself the wrong lesson.

While you are in there, check what you are counting as a conversion. If you are counting page views, newsletter signups, and phone-menu presses all as one "conversion" event, Smart Bidding is chasing the cheapest one, which is rarely the one that pays your rent.

3. Look at whether the auction changed around you

Sometimes nothing on your side broke. A well-funded competitor entered the auction, or an existing one raised their bids, and your average position and cost per click moved with it.

The auction insights report shows impression share and overlap rate against other advertisers over time. If your impression share dropped and a competitor's overlap rate climbed in the same period, you are in a bidding war you did not start. That does not mean match them dollar for dollar. It means you now need a real answer to the question "why should someone click us instead of them", and that answer lives on your landing page and in your offer, not in your bid.

4. Read the landing page as a stranger would

Traffic quality can be fine while conversion rate collapses because something happened to the destination. This is the check people skip because they assume the page is "done".

Open the actual landing page the ad points to, on a phone, on the connection a normal person has:

• Does the headline match the ad they clicked? A mismatch between promise and page is the fastest way to lose someone.
• Did a recent site update push the form below three scrolls of hero image?
• Is the phone number tappable, and does it ring to someone who answers?
• Did a cookie banner or chat widget start covering the call to action on mobile?
• Is the page loading, at all, right now? Redirect chains and expired pages happen.

A page that converted at a healthy rate in the spring can quietly break after a theme update in the fall. Nobody tests the ad path after a website change because the website team and the ads team are usually different people.

5. Separate "what changed in the account" from "what changed in the world"

Pull up the change history in the ads platform. This is an underused report that logs every edit, when it happened, and who made it. Overlay that against the day performance dipped.

Common self-inflicted culprits:

• A switch from manual bidding to a Smart Bidding strategy, which resets the learning period.
• A budget change large enough to knock campaigns back into learning.
• A new asset or ad variant that quietly won more of the auction and underperformed.
• Someone paused the campaign that was actually carrying the account.

If the change history is clean and the timing lines up with a holiday, a seasonal low, or a genuine demand shift, then the account is fine and your expectations need adjusting. Do not rebuild a working campaign to fix a slow week in July.

6. Check whether you are measuring the wrong outcome

The account can be doing its job while the business feels no benefit. That happens when the metric you optimize toward and the metric that pays the bills have drifted apart.

Leads are not revenue. If lead volume held steady but the sales team says the leads are worse, the account may have shifted toward cheaper, lower-intent queries to hit a cost-per-lead target. The fix is upstream: feed real close data back into the platform, or bid toward the leads that actually book, not the ones that fill out a form.

This is the check that requires talking to sales, and it is the one that gets skipped most often. A perfect cost per lead is worthless if none of those leads become customers.

Work the list in order

Most paid search problems are one of the first two items: a search terms report that needs cleaning or a conversion tag that quietly broke. Start there every time. The later checks matter, but they are rarer, and jumping to "our competitor outspent us" or "the market changed" lets you avoid the boring, fixable stuff that is usually the real cause.

If you want a second set of eyes on where an account is leaking, run your site through our free grader to see the landing-page and tracking issues first, or apply for partnership if you would rather we work the whole list with you and tie our pay to what those leads become.