Ads bring people in, but your website sells. You pay for every click, and if a person lands on a slow page, an old promotion or a form that does not work, the money is spent and there is no lead. No well-configured account can fix that.
Below are five checks. You can do all of them yourself, with no developer and no special knowledge, in about 15 minutes. Do them before you launch ads, then repeat once a week: websites break quietly, after updates, an email change or a quick edit. We checked the facts against Google’s help pages on 18 October 2026. We give the names of menu items and sections as they appear in Google’s English help; depending on the interface version, they may differ slightly.
1. Open your website on a phone
People who click on an ad are very often on a smartphone. You can see your own share in Google Analytics, in the reports about visitors’ devices. But you can check the site through such a person’s eyes even without numbers.
Take your phone and walk the whole customer path: from the ad to the lead form. The text should be readable without zooming. Buttons should respond to a finger, not “only on the second try”. Nothing should spill off the edge of the screen, and a promotion pop-up or cookie consent window should not cover the button that has to be pressed.
Google’s help page on Quality Score (the rating your account gives an ad and its page) lists three tips for the landing page (the page the ad leads to): a mobile-friendly site with easy navigation, fast loading, and the same offer in the ad and on the page. Google calls Quality Score a diagnostic tool that is not used in the auction, but the tips fit any website.
2. The page opens quickly
According to Google, most people leave a website on their phone if it takes long to load. And the money for the click has already been spent.
The check is simple. Open pagespeed.web.dev, paste the address of exactly the page your ad leads to (not the home page) and run the analysis. Look at the result for mobile devices. Google considers a page fast if its largest element (usually the main photo or headline) appears within 2.5 seconds. This measure is called LCP; you do not need to remember it, only the number.
There are two traps.
Two kinds of data. The report has a section called “Real-user experience data” and one called “Lab diagnostics”. The first is collected from real visitors (small sites often do not have it, because there is too little traffic). The second is a simulation on a slow phone and a mobile network. Lab data helps you find what exactly slows the page down, but real visitors matter more.
What score counts as fine. Opinions differ here. Some practitioners treat about 80 points out of 100 as a target for mobile and stress that it is their own unofficial benchmark. Others advise not chasing the green circle: the gap in points between sites that sell well and sites that sell badly is tiny, and the tool’s own margin of error is noticeable. Google does not name such a “pass mark”: its official threshold is the same 2.5 seconds for the largest element. So we suggest this: run the test twice (results fluctuate a little), look at the seconds rather than the coloured circle, and act only if the page is clearly slow. In our experience, a common cause is photos that are too large. You can replace them with compressed ones yourself in your site’s admin panel.
3. Promotions and prices on the site are today’s
The discount ended in September, but the banner is still up. A person came for a promotion that does not exist, and left. The same happens when the ad shows one price and the site another.
Open the ad and the site side by side, as if you were a customer. The price, the promotion and the dates should match.
This is not only about trust, it is also a Google rule. Google Ads policy on unavailable offers forbids promoting a product, service or promotion that is not available on the site or is hard to find. The requirements for promotions also say that prices should be accurate and the offer easy to find on the page the ad leads to. So when a promotion ends, remove it from the site and from the ad on the same day. Use a calendar as a reminder: put the end date of the promotion in a day early.
4. The phone number can be tapped and someone answers
The number on your site should dial with one tap on a phone, not make people copy it by hand. And it should be text, not a picture. This is not a detail: under Google’s rules, the number in the ad must appear on the site the ad leads to, and Google looks for it there. If the number exists only in an image, Google cannot verify it, and the number in the ad may not be shown.
Then call yourself. Do it during working hours and in the evening, when the ads are running. Does anyone pick up? After how many rings? If nobody answers in the evening, you can set days and hours for showing the number in the ad settings, so it appears only when someone can really answer. This is advice, not a Google requirement: the help page simply describes such a display schedule. We wrote about a similar story with weekends in the article about ads turned off for the weekend.
From our experience: when an owner says “ads bring no customers”, it helps to listen to 10–15 calls from ads, if they are recorded. It often turns out that a person did call, but nobody answered, or the manager replied in a way that made them leave. This is experience, not statistics, but the check is cheap.
5. The lead form reaches you
Forms break quietly. The site was updated, the email was changed, the hosting was moved, and the message from the page no longer goes anywhere. The ads work, people fill in the form, and you do not know it.
Leave a test enquiry yourself, from the page the ad leads to and from a phone. The email or the CRM entry (the program where you keep customer records) should arrive within a minute. Check your “Spam” folder too. Do it once a week, even if only on Monday morning.
There is a second half to this check that people often forget: does the advertising see that the lead happened? If tracking is set to the click on the “Send” button, it will count an empty or failed submission as well. It is more reliable to count only a successful one: showing the “Thank you” page or a success message. Practitioners also warn that after a site update such tracking can break silently. So after every site update, send a test enquiry and see whether it appears in the conversions report in Google Ads. We wrote about duplicates and false conversions in the article about three checks, and about the services that should be connected to your site in the checklist for owners.
What we see in practice
Money is most often lost not on ad settings but on small things on the site that nobody remembers, because “it used to work”. Typical pictures from our experience: the phone button does not respond because a pop-up covers it; the form says “Thank you”, but the email goes to an old address; a promotion is displayed while the terms changed long ago. None of this shows up in the click report, so you have to check by hand.
Summary: five checks in 15 minutes
- Walk through the site on a phone, from the ad to the lead form.
- Check the speed of the ad’s page on pagespeed.web.dev for mobile: the main element within 2.5 seconds.
- Compare the ad and the site: prices, promotions and dates are the same.
- Call the number yourself, during working hours and in the evening.
- Leave a test enquiry and wait for the email.
If even one item fails, fix it first and only then raise the budget. How we build advertising once the site is in order is described in the sections on search advertising and Performance Max.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you what works and what is worth fixing.