What to do when Google Ads performance declines

It’s a familiar – and frustrating – scenario for any PPC expert.

You log into your ads account, and the numbers are trending in the wrong direction. 

Dashboards are red, pressure is building, and stakeholders want answers.

But a dip in performance is more than just a red metric or a single bad day. 

It’s often a pattern that unfolds over weeks, with real business impact and growing concern across the team.

But your job isn’t just to react. You’re expected to provide clarity, a plan, and a path forward that reassures everyone involved.

This article outlines a strategic framework for navigating performance declines. 

You’ll learn how to contextualize the issue, align with stakeholders, and identify the most effective levers to pull within your paid ads account.

1. Diagnose before you act: Framing the performance decline

Before you make any optimizations, understand the true nature of the decline. 

Jumping into an account and making basic or even drastic changes – like overhauling campaigns, adding a ton of new keywords, or changing match types wholesale – can cause more damage than it solves. 

Avoid relying solely on the Recommendations tab and blindly applying every suggestion the platform offers. I’ve witnessed this approach before, and it led to a complete disaster.

Instead, you need to pause, evaluate, and stick to a clear strategy until the performance dip has resolved or can be explained.

Dig deeper: Top Google Ads recommendations you should always ignore, use, or evaluate

2. Clarify goals and separate signal from noise

You need to distinguish between a perceived decline and an actual decline. 

A CMO or traffic manager might be concerned about a drop in impressions or site traffic, but these are often vanity metrics or diagnostic indicators, not the full picture.

The real question is whether key performance indicators (KPIs) – like return on ad spend (ROAS) or conversion value – are actually declining.

In lead gen accounts, that means asking: Is conversion volume decreasing or is cost per acquisition (CPA) rising?

If your account started with a clear measurement plan, now is the time to revisit it. 

Realign with your boss or client on the core goals. A simple email can often clarify this and prevent miscommunication.

Realize that this alignment is critical because as conversion value increases, return on ad spend often decreases, especially during a period of growth.

If you work in lead generation, you may notice an increase in CPA when prioritizing quality over quantity. 

A measurement plan is essential to effectively navigate this. It serves as both your safeguard and guide in these discussions.

3. Look beyond the platform: Analyze external factors

Once you’ve confirmed a decline in actual performance, it’s time to look outside the ad platform. 

A performance decline isn’t always caused by a problem within your campaigns. 

Often, the market itself is the cause.

Seasonality

Performance naturally fluctuates throughout the year. 

For example, a vacation rental company will see a predictable dip in the winter months. It’s your job to contextualize this for the client. 

A change in CPA during an off-season might be a logical change that requires a budget adjustment, not a major account optimization.

Promotional cycles

Similar to seasonality, performance will naturally spike during a sale and then dip after it ends. 

Factor this into your analysis. Is the current dip just a return to baseline after a successful promotion?

Competitive landscape

What are your competitors doing? Have they changed their pricing, launched a major sale, or increased their ad spend? 

Competitor actions can draw attention to the market generally, impacting your own conversion rates.

Broader market changes

Are there any other shifts in the market that could be affecting demand for your product or service? 

Markets can shift during major news cycles or in response to social issues.

Dig deeper: PPC diagnostics: How to find and fix the root cause of low conversions

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4. Ready to optimize? Start with these strategic steps

If you have decided to start making changes in the ad platform, these are the best steps you can take.

Start by looking at the biggest drivers of your ad spend.

• Sort campaigns by spend: Begin by examining the campaigns that spend the most. These are the campaigns that have the greatest impact on overall account performance.
• Evaluate contribution: Analyze how these top-spending campaigns are contributing to your KPIs. Depending on your goals, you’ll want to look at:
  • ROAS.
  • Conversion value.
  • Conversions.
  • CPA.
• Tailor your analysis by campaign type: This is the point where you begin to tailor your analysis based on the campaign type. 
  • For an ecommerce campaign, you’ll focus heavily on ROAS and conversion value. 
  • For a lead generation campaign, CPA and conversion volume will be your top priorities.

Choose the right levers based on your performance goals

Once you’ve identified the underperforming campaigns, it’s time to get granular. 

The levers you pull will depend on your primary performance metric.

If ROAS has decreased

• Adjust bidding
  • A decreased ROAS means you’re not getting enough return for your ad spend. 
  • One of the easiest solutions is to go into the campaign settings and slightly increase your target ROAS. 
  • This tells Google’s automation to bid more conservatively for a better return.
• Pull back budget
  • Concurrently, you can consider slightly decreasing the campaign’s budget. 
  • This combination of a tighter target and a smaller budget can often bring the ROAS back in line by focusing on only the highest-value opportunities.
• Micro-optimize ad groups and keywords
  • Dive into the ad groups and keywords within the underperforming campaign. 
  • Sort by spend and look for specific keywords or ad groups that are not meeting your ROAS target. 
  • You can either pause these underperformers or adjust their match types to be more restrictive. 
  • This granular approach can isolate the problem without disrupting the entire campaign.

If conversion value is the primary goal

• Reallocate budget
  • When your goal is to maximize total conversion value (meaning you’re focused on generating the most revenue, even at a lower ROAS), the best lever to pull is budget allocation.
• Increase spend on high-value campaigns
  • Identify the campaigns or ad groups generating the highest conversion value and allocate more budget to the campaign. 
  • This helps Google’s algorithms identify and deliver more high-value conversions. 
  • If an ad group shows strong potential, consider splitting it into its own campaign to dedicate additional budget and maximize performance.
• Decrease spend on low-value campaigns
  • Take budget away from campaigns that are not delivering a significant return and reallocate it to your top performers.

For lead gen accounts, the key performance indicators are typically conversion volume (the number of forms filled out) and CPA. 

The levers you pull will be a direct response to which of these metrics is underperforming.

• If conversion volume has decreased
  • Expand your reach: A drop in conversion volume suggests you’re not reaching enough potential leads. To get more volume, you can:
    • Add keywords: Research and add new, relevant keywords to your campaigns.
    • Use Dynamic Search Ads: Consider adding a Dynamic Search Ads campaign to automatically find and target new queries on your website.
    • Broaden match types: Become less restrictive by expanding your match types for keywords.
  • Reallocate budget: Similar to ecommerce, shift budget from underperforming campaigns to those that are generating the most conversions.
• If CPA has increased (loss of efficiency)
  • Tighten your targeting: An increase in CPA means you’re spending more to get a conversion. To increase efficiency, you must become more restrictive.
  • Use negative keywords: This is a crucial step. Add negative keywords to your campaigns to prevent your ads from showing for irrelevant or low-quality searches.
  • Refine keywords and match types: Review your keywords and ad groups, and pause any that are driving a high CPA. Consider tightening match types to ensure you’re only bidding on the most relevant searches.
  • Adjust CPA targets: If you’re using a smart bidding strategy, set a more restrictive target CPA. This tells Google to be less aggressive in its bidding, focusing on more cost-effective conversions.

Refine ad copy and landing pages to improve user experience

Once you’ve adjusted campaign settings and bids, it’s time to focus on messaging. 

While it’s easy to stay fixated on metrics, your ad copy and landing page often have the most direct impact on performance. 

Together, they shape the user experience – and can either reinforce or undermine everything you’ve optimized so far.

The ad copy should speak to the customer

With the rise of responsive search ads (RSAs), it can feel overwhelming to craft an entirely new ad when the system is already generating tens of thousands of combinations. 

However, you can still improve performance by focusing on the core components.

• Review your assets
  • Look at the performance data for your headlines and descriptions.
    • Which assets are being used most frequently? 
    • Which combinations have the highest click-through rates? 
  • Identify the top performers and create new assets that are similar in tone or message.
• Test a new angle
  • If your ads are underperforming, consider a new creative approach.
    • Do they speak to a different pain point? 
    • Highlight a new benefit? 
  • Even small changes to your headline or a single description line can change how users perceive your offer and whether they choose to click.
• Structure your ads optimally
  • Learn how to assemble high-performing RSAs in Brad Geddes’s Search Engine Land article, “How to assemble captivating Google Ads copy.”

Review the landing page experience

A perfect ad is useless if it leads to a poor landing page. 

Think of the user journey as a chain: the ad copy is one link, and the landing page is the next. 

If that second link is weak, the entire chain breaks. 

While this isn’t a full PPC CRO deep dive, your landing page remains a critical factor in diagnosing performance issues.

• Message match
  • Is the message and offer on the landing page a perfect match for what you promised in the ad? Inconsistency creates confusion and causes users to bounce.
• Clarity and speed
  • Is the landing page easy to navigate? Is the call to action (CTA) clear and prominent? Does the page load quickly? Poor user experience, especially slow load times, can kill a campaign before it has a chance to succeed.

As paid search expert Harrison Jack Hepp recently emphasized, landing pages are a key piece of the success puzzle. 

While not part of the Google Ads platform, they are a critical component of your paid search strategy.

Hepp offers these four essential tips to ensure your landing page isn’t holding you back:

A note on funnel management

While these optimizations are essential for improving performance, it’s important to be mindful of your overall strategy. 

The tendency when optimizing is to move further and further down the sales funnel, reallocating spend from awareness-focused campaigns (like YouTube or Demand Gen) to bottom-funnel, high-intent campaigns. 

This can improve short-term performance when there is a decline, but can starve your funnel of new customers over time. 

If you’re running paid social campaigns on platforms like Facebook, this may be less of a concern, as they often excel at filling the top of the funnel. 

However, it’s a critical consideration to prevent your paid ads account from becoming overly dependent on a shrinking pool of high-intent searchers.

Dig deeper: How to analyze your marketing funnel and fix costly drop-offs

Final thoughts

By following this framework – contextualizing the issue, aligning with stakeholders, analyzing external factors, and making targeted optimizations – you can approach performance declines with clarity and confidence.

Paid search is as much about strategic thinking as it is about tactical execution, and a structured process ensures you stay in control, even when results start to slip.