Ads are running. Where are the enquiries? What to check before increasing the budget

Everything is moving in the ad account: impressions are rising, clicks are trickling in, and money is being charged with a discipline the whole team could sometimes learn from. Yet the phone stays silent.

You ask, “Where are the customers?” Back comes a screenshot with a lovely little arrow. Well done, arrow. Still, you can’t pay your sales manager’s salary with it just yet.

It’s easy to decide that the ads aren’t working. Or that the budget is too small. Either could be true, but there’s a whole journey between a click and a payment. Someone has to reach the right page, understand the offer, feel ready to get in touch, successfully send an enquiry and receive a reply.

You can lose a customer at any of those steps. And your ad account won’t always tell you about it.

Let’s work out how to find where the journey breaks down before increasing the budget. The examples below are hypothetical: they explain how to check the process, rather than presenting an invented story as an agency case study.

“We have twenty conversions” and “twenty people contacted us” are different statements.

A conversion in your ad account might be a completed form, a click on a phone number, a click through to a messaging app or another action you’ve configured. As a business owner, you might sometimes group all of them under “enquiries”. For the business, the difference is huge.

Clicking on Telegram doesn’t mean sending a message. Tapping a phone number doesn’t mean getting through. Seeing a thank-you page doesn’t guarantee that your team received the message.

Imagine a workshop that repairs coffee machines. The report shows twenty conversions: twelve taps on the phone number and eight clicks through to a messaging app. Its log records four conversations and three messages. That doesn’t yet prove that thirteen enquiries went missing: some people might have changed their minds before making contact. But it’s also too early to call all twenty actions actual enquiries.

Start by separating three things:

• An action towards making contact: someone clicked a button, started filling in a form or opened a chat.
• An enquiry received: the message really arrived, the form submission was saved or a conversation took place.
• An enquiry about your service: the request matches what you sell and can be followed up.

Then count agreements, orders and payments further down the line.

Google Ads distinguishes between primary and secondary conversions. Primary conversions can be used for bidding when the relevant standard goal is selected for a campaign; secondary conversions are generally used for observation. There are exceptions for custom goals. So you need to check more than the event’s name: check which actions the particular campaign is optimising for. Google’s explanation of primary and secondary conversions.

What to do: ask for a list of all the actions the report calls conversions. Next to each one, write down in plain language what actually happens. If it says “clicked a button”, don’t rename it “new customer” just to brighten up Monday.

Before talking strategy, do one boring but useful thing: try contacting your own business.

Open the page the ad links to. That exact page, rather than the homepage you remember from the designer’s presentation. To test the form, you can open the URL directly: there’s no need to pay for a click on your own ad.

It’s better to start on your phone, using mobile data. On your office laptop, you see the site in comfortable conditions. A potential customer might be standing next to a broken coffee machine, holding a child’s hand and having roughly zero desire to decipher your navigation.

Check:

1. Does the right page open, and can you see which service you offer?
2. Is a banner, chat widget or consent form covering the button?
3. Can you fill in the fields and enter a phone number without problems?
4. Is there a clear confirmation after submitting?
5. Does the test enquiry arrive somewhere the person responsible will see it?
6. Does the phone link work, and does the right chat open?

Label the test enquiry so your team doesn’t waste time trying to sell to itself. And check receipt at the other end: “Thank you!” on the website is only part of the test.

For example, the form might send an email to an employee who has left. Or the Telegram message might land in a group where everyone has muted notifications. As far as the button is concerned, everything is wonderful. As far as the business is concerned, the enquiry has gone to live in the woods.

If a contractor’s departure has left you unsure who controls the form, email or access, start with our article “Your contractor disappeared. What’s left of your website?”.

What to do: record the time of the test, device, page and result. “The form is weird” is hard to fix. “On a phone, pressing the button produces an error and the enquiry isn’t received” is a specific task.

The opposite can happen too: enquiries are arriving, but the ad system can’t see them. You’re looking at a zero in the account, your sales manager is replying to people, and the team is arguing about whether to switch everything off.

So check both sides: whether an enquiry was actually received and whether it was measured.

The test needs a simple answer: which event should fire after a successful enquiry, and does it actually fire? Check separately for duplicate counting, for example when one submission is counted in two different ways.

Google provides Tag Assistant to check conversion tags on your website. It’s a technical diagnostic tool; it won’t confirm for you that your team received the enquiry or that someone bought something. Official Tag Assistant instructions.

In GA4, enhanced measurement can collect form_start and form_submit events. They describe interactions with a form. The practical takeaway for a business owner: check that such an event matches the actual outcome of the submission. Don’t use its name as proof that an enquiry was delivered. Google Analytics event descriptions.

Don’t demand identical numbers from every system down to the last unit: they may count different actions and attribute them to sources and dates differently. But your team should be able to explain exactly what each number means and where measurement stops.

What to do: ask for three scenarios to be tested: a successful enquiry, a failed submission and reopening the confirmation page. Make sure the report doesn’t present an error or a repeat page view as a new enquiry.

If your data already lives in several places and contradicts itself, the job of analytics is to help connect it to real actions. One more beautiful chart won’t settle that argument on its own.

A working form doesn’t make every visitor useful to the business.

Let’s return to the workshop. It repairs commercial coffee machines in one city. Yet some visitors are looking for instructions for a home machine, a spare part or a job as a repair technician. They can click on the ad in perfectly good faith, and just as honestly order nothing.

For search ads, look at the search terms report. The keyword your team added to the campaign and the actual phrase someone typed aren’t the same thing. Those actual searches help you understand the visitor’s intent. Some terms may not appear because of privacy restrictions, so this isn’t a complete record of every search. Google’s help page on the search terms report.

For social media ads, check something else: who the creative appeals to and what it promises. An ad saying “Find out the price for free” might attract people curious about the price, while you’re expecting people ready to commission a complex project.

That doesn’t mean you should send away everyone who’s still thinking. You need to understand who you’re attracting and what next step you’re offering.

What to do: group enquiries by reason: our service, another service, wrong region, job application, spam or not enough information. Then compare those reasons with the campaigns. “The leads are bad” is a feeling. “This campaign brings requests for repairs we don’t do” is a reason to make a change.

Don’t start adding negative keywords indiscriminately after one odd enquiry. First check whether it’s a one-off or a recurring problem.

People click on a specific promise. If they land in a different world after clicking, they have to start their search all over again.

The ad says: “On-site coffee machine repairs for cafés.” The page says: “Innovative solutions for your success.” Somewhere near the bottom, between the brand’s history and a photo of the director, the repair service is hiding.

You know it’s there. Your visitor isn’t obliged to conduct an archaeological expedition.

Google also recommends aligning the ad’s content with the landing page, providing useful information and making navigation simple. That’s a basic principle of meeting expectations, rather than a guarantee of enquiries. Google’s recommendations for ads and landing pages.

Look at the first screen and the sections that follow through the eyes of someone hearing about you for the first time. Can they understand:

• exactly what you do and who it’s for;
• whether you work in their city or handle their type of problem;
• what the price depends on;
• what happens after they get in touch;
• why they can trust you with the work?

Not every service has a fixed price. But “price on request” is a weak explanation. Say what you need to make an estimate: the equipment model, symptoms, address, a photo or a short description of the task. If you state a starting price, explain what it includes and what might cost extra.

The same goes for trust. “The best professionals” is easy to write. A specific explanation of how you work, real examples and clear terms help someone assess your offer.

What to do: put the ad text next to the page. Check where someone finds confirmation of each promise. If the promise doesn’t match the actual service, the ad needs fixing too, along with the website.

You want a phone number, email address, company name, budget, staff count and a detailed project description. Your visitor wanted to ask whether you repair their model of coffee machine.

Suddenly, your first introduction feels like a loan application.

A long form isn’t always bad. For a complex order, some of that information really is necessary. The question is whether you need it right now, and whether the person understands why.

List the fields and ask this about each one: can we start a conversation without it? If so, perhaps it should move to the next step.

But don’t mechanically cut the form down to “leave your number”. Your sales manager might then get more contacts with no context at all. The aim is to make getting in touch manageable for the customer and useful for the team.

Check the button itself too. “Submit” doesn’t explain what happens next. “Ask about a repair” or “Get an initial estimate” might describe the action more accurately, if that matches your process.

What to do: choose one specific change: remove an unnecessary required field, explain the next step or fix a problem on phones. Record the date and compare the enquiries received and their quality. Don’t change everything at once: afterwards, it will be hard to tell what helped.

An enquiry can arrive without the person ever getting a conversation.

They get a call the following day, by which time they’ve found another repair technician. Or the sales manager calls once, fails to get through and closes the contact as “not a fit”. Or someone asks “what are you interested in?” in the chat, even though the person has just described the problem in detail in the form.

For diagnosis, you need a simple log: when the enquiry arrived, who is responsible, when the first contact attempt happened, whether a conversation took place and what was agreed next.

If you don’t have a CRM, you can start with a spreadsheet with restricted access. The main thing is that enquiries shouldn’t live only in one employee’s memory. We’ve also covered how to bring order to leads, work and payments.

Agree on a realistic response process during working hours, and on what the customer sees outside them. Don’t promise “we’ll call you back in a minute” if the only thing left in the office after six is a ficus.

What to do: review a few recent enquiries from receipt to outcome. Use records and facts: received, tried to contact, spoke, made an offer, agreed or declined. Record the reason for declining when you know it; don’t invent it on the customer’s behalf.

Pouring more traffic into a broken form is an expensive way to confirm that it’s broken.

But keeping the budget unchanged in every situation makes little sense either. If the journey works, the right people are coming and your team can cope, increased spending could be the next thing to test.

Your decision depends on what you found:

• The test enquiry doesn’t arrive. Check the form and delivery channel; if necessary, pause ads sending people to the broken page.
• Enquiries are arriving, but the report can’t see them. Check measurement and conversion definitions.
• Requests come in for a service you don’t offer. Check audience intent, search terms, geography and the ad’s promise.
• People don’t understand the offer. Check how well the page matches the ad and how clearly it explains the next step.
• Enquiries get lost after arrival. Check who is responsible, response times and the follow-up process.
• Relevant enquiries turn into orders. Check acquisition costs, the economics of those orders and your team’s ability to take on more.

Don’t set a universal limit such as “an enquiry must cost no more than two hundred hryvnias”. Acceptable costs vary with the service, margin and proportion of enquiries that become sales. A cheap enquiry for work you don’t do doesn’t become good value just because it’s cheap.

Likewise, don’t judge the whole business by a handful of clicks. Drawing conclusions requires data that takes your sales cycle into account. At the same time, you don’t need to patiently study a broken button for a month just to collect statistics.

Here’s a message template for your team or contractor, rather than a quote from an expert:

And agree on where the findings will be kept. Beyond a seven-minute voice message that everyone listened to at 1.5× speed and understood differently.

A useful next step has three parts: what we’re changing, who is responsible and how we’ll check the result. For example: “Restore enquiry delivery to the work chat; the developer is responsible; the check is that the sales manager receives a clearly labelled test enquiry.”

That’s a task. Unlike “we need to improve conversions”, which you can ceremoniously carry from one plan to the next until retirement.

Advertising brings someone to your business. From there, they need a clear offer, a working way to get in touch and a team that picks up the conversation.

If you’d like to examine that journey in your own business, write to us. We’ll look at your advertising, page, measurement and enquiry handling, and work out what’s worth fixing first.