You’re running paid ads. You’re investing consistently. But somehow, your results don’t match the effort or the budget. Sales are stagnant, acquisition costs are rising, and all you get from your agency are basic monthly reports with no “what next” recommendations.
It can be tough to pinpoint what’s not working. Are you attracting the wrong audience? Is your creative outdated? Is your agency just checking boxes? We wrote this guide to help you spot the signs of underperformance, understand where paid campaigns often go wrong, and what questions to ask your agency to get things back on track.
How to know your paid ads aren’t working (signs to watch for)
You don’t need to be a marketing expert to know when paid ads aren’t delivering. If your ad spend is increasing but your sales or lead volume isn’t, that’s a warning sign. Even when you’re getting clicks or traffic, the key question is: are those visits converting into customers?
Some red flags to watch for:
- You’re getting traffic but low conversion rates
- You’re not sure what ROI you’re getting for your budget
- Ad assets haven’t been refreshed in months
- Reporting focuses on surface-level metrics like impressions or ROAS, without explaining what’s actually driving results
- You feel like you’re in the dark about what’s working and what’s not
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s time to ask different questions.
What is a low conversion rate?
At Geeks360, we use the following benchmarks for the average conversion rates per industry in the U.S. market:
Google:
- Finance: 5–6%
- E-commerce: 2–4%
- Healthcare: 4–6%
- B2B SaaS/Services: 5-7%
Meta:
- E-commerce: 1–2%
- Beauty/Wellness: 2–4%
- Fitness/Health: 3–5%
- Education/Online courses: 2–3.5%
- B2B lead gen: 1–3%
If your paid ads are not delivering conversion rates in the ranges above, they may not be optimized.
5 reasons why your paid ads aren’t driving the results you expected
You’re spending. You’re seeing clicks. But the numbers that matter—sales, new customers, return on investment—aren’t where they should be. When that’s the case, it’s rarely just one issue. Paid ads that underperform rarely fail for just one reason. Often, it’s a combination of misaligned strategy, unclear targeting, outdated creative, or limited testing. Here’s where we see things break down most often.
1. Inadequate audience targeting or segmentation
Not all ad traffic is created equal. You may be driving clicks, but are they the right clicks? Many brands waste the budget attracting visitors who were never going to convert to a customer. If you’re attracting people who are curious but not ready to buy, or worse, people completely outside your target audience, you’ll end up burning through your budget fast.
On the other hand, too-narrow targeting can limit scale. Success comes from understanding who your high-intent buyers are, how to reach them, and how to segment your audiences to test what works.
And even when your traffic is high quality and audience targeting is on point, you can still lose your buyers if your landing page doesn’t match the ad message, tone, or visual. Misleading hooks, poor layout, unclear CTAs, or slow load times can all impact conversion. The landing experience needs to meet the intent.
2. Weak or outdated creative that doesn’t convert
Your creative is an important performance driver. It’s your storefront. It’s your message, your hook, your value proposition, your offer—all in one visual or video. If it doesn’t resonate, even the best-targeted ad won’t convert. And if you’re using the same creatives across platforms or haven’t refreshed them in months, you’re likely facing creative fatigue and lower performance as a result.
But that’s just the baseline. In a sea of brands competing for attention, a strong creative doesn’t just inform, it interrupts. It stops the scroll. It grabs attention and makes someone lean in, not swipe past. To perform, your creative needs to deliver the right message in a relevant, engaging format and stand out enough to break through the noise. Relevance matters, but so does impact.
3. There’s no clear testing and learning framework
Paid media is not “set and forget.” Performance depends on consistent testing across audiences, creatives, placements, and offers, and learning from those tests. If you aren’t running regular structured tests or don’t know what you’ve learned (and how learnings are applied), you’re not learning and running campaigns on autopilot.
Whether it’s a new or established campaign, there’s a wide range of configurations and targeting options to test in order to find the most effective algorithms. At Geeks360, depending on the company’s goals, timeline, and budget, we test most variations upfront or gradually over time. But testing and learning is an important part of the marketing plan and service.
Growth comes from compounding what works, and optimizing what doesn’t. We believe that in order to improve and scale results, every brand should allocate at least 10–15% of their monthly ad budget specifically for testing and identifying new high-performing paths.
4. The tracking setup is incomplete or broken
This one is more common than it should be. If your tracking setup across ad platforms isn’t correctly capturing conversions and key events (like add to cart, checkout start, or purchase), you’re basing strategy on incomplete data. And if you can’t trust your data, you can’t confidently scale.
Without correctly setup tracking you can’t test and learn, and you can’t use your performance data to train and optimize the ad platform algorithms. Many marketing agencies don’t offer this as part of their paid ads service. At Geeks360, we approach paid ads strategically and start with tracking setup before we do anything else.
And actually, we go beyond tracking. We don’t just focus on tracking performance metrics, but also ensure we feed data back to the platforms, marking which leads were qualified and which weren’t. This helps the algorithms learn faster and improve targeting accuracy over time.
5. Your agency is reactive rather than strategic
This might be the most overlooked issue. We often see brands run paid campaigns without a clear strategy. Budgets are set arbitrarily (sometimes too low to be effective), and campaigns are launched without a structured testing plan or backup options. Whether it’s a founder clicking through ad settings or an agency relying on default configurations, the result is the same: underperformance.
If your agency reports on metrics but can’t explain why results are fluctuating, or what they’re doing about it, they’re staying at surface level. Strategic partners think ahead, test hypotheses, and bring you a Plan B (or C, or D), not just a monthly recap.
At Geeks360, we go beyond what many agencies offer. For example, we believe that every paid ad campaign should come with multiple contingency plans. We’ve seen too many brands leave campaigns running even when Google Performance Max misallocates impressions or Meta’s targeting is off. We monitor but also adjust, rebuild, and optimize until the outcomes match the objective.
In one case, sales data revealed that certain U.S. states were consistently outperforming others. We restructured the campaign by state, increased bids in top-performing regions, and adjusted the rest based on performance. The result? Higher ROAS across the board and more sales even in the underperforming areas. That’s the kind of optimization most agencies never get around to.
Smart questions to ask your agency if performance is stalling
A reactive agency will tell you the numbers went down. A strategic one will tell you why, what they’re doing about it, and what to expect next. If you believe your paid ads aren’t delivering the expected results, here’s what to ask your agency:
- How are we qualifying and segmenting traffic? Are we just targeting broadly or relying on high-intent signals? What are we doing with customer data?
- What’s our creative testing framework? How often are we launching new creatives? What types of tests are we running? What’s driving the results and why?
- How are we tracking and reporting on conversions across platforms? Do we have full-funnel tracking in place? Are we measuring key goals accurately?
- What’s our audience and bidding strategy, and how often do we review it? Is it evolving with performance? Are we testing new segments?
- What’s our plan to reduce CPA over time? Do we have a strategy for driving down acquisition costs as we scale, or are we just spending more?
- How are you proactively identifying underperformance and acting on it? Do you come to us with solutions, or wait for us to ask why results are slipping?
From underperforming ads to strategic growth
If your ads aren’t working, that doesn’t mean paid media “isn’t for you.” It just means you need to take a step back and revisit the basics, with better strategy, tighter execution, and stronger alignment between your marketing goals and media efforts.
A smart agency will work alongside you as your strategic partner and ask hard questions, make data-backed recommendations, and treat paid ads not as a one-off campaign, but as a growth engine.
At Geeks360, that’s exactly how we work. We combine full-funnel creative testing, expert campaign management, and clear, strategic reporting that helps you understand your ad strategy and how your ads translate into growth.
Ready to fix what’s not working? Let’s launch ads that deliver.
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