Google Ads Spend Up, Calls Stopped? How to Diagnose It (Real Case)

0:00 Why Calls Drop While Ad Spend Rises
Hey, I’m Jeremy with PushLeads, and I help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration. And in this video, we’re talking about what happens if your calls stop, but you’re spending more money on Google Ads. And this is a real case study with one of my clients. I have a dumpster rental client company in Asheville, North Carolina, and they were dealing with some issues this past week that include a slowdown as well as other things. And so they were spending more money on Google Ads, but it wasn’t translating into actually visibility. So let’s jump into it.

0:29 First Three Checks Before Anything Else
So the short answer is, if your calls are going down, but your spend is going up, the first thing you want to do is check your website and check your phone numbers and make sure everything is wired up correctly. Because generally, small little things like SEO issues or wrong phone numbers or even small little code in different places in your website can sometimes break this whole situation. So the first thing you want to do is call yourself first. Dial your own phone from your phone– your cell number before changing anything, make sure it works. And then secondly, if you change something in Google Ads, look at the history and check who changed what, and make sure that no changes you made are actually impacting your calls. And then third, make sure your calls are recorded at all. So zero calls in Google Ads usually means there’s something not set up correctly. So it’s usually one of those things versus the whole thing broken or the whole thing not working.

1:22 Real Client Timeline Spend vs Calls
So in this case, for my client, what basically happened is we were spending nine hundred and twenty-four dollars from October twentieth to November ninth, and we had ninety-one ad clicks, but zero calls were recorded that whole time. And here’s kind of a timeline. We had, like, Google Ads begin recording calls around October twentieth, and so we saw zero calls at that point. And then November fourth, the owner’s phone went quiet. And then November fifth through sixth, the ads dropped to about one click a day, down from the typical sort of three to eight. In November seventh, we spent more money. The owner decided to raise the budget. So the weekly budget went from two hundred and eighty-one dollars to three hundred and forty-seven. And then November ninth, the clicks recovered, but the calls did not recover. So at that point, we began the audit.

2:06 Seven Call Leaks Found in the Audit
And this is kind of a hard situation to diagnose because ad spend is going up, but yet the calls aren’t going up. And so generally, it’s usually something wrong with the website itself or the Google Ads itself. So when your site or your website or your Google Ads or your Google Business Profile are all sending people the same phone number, but you don’t have any call tracking, you’re kind of guessing. And that’s kind of the situation here. The owner does not have call tracking. I really recommend CallRail or GoHighLevel in that situation. Raising the budget without really knowing and tracking exactly, just sort of asking, "Hey, are your calls going up?" is kind of frustrating, but that was what we had to deal with because we’re not dealing with call tracking in this situation. So you always really want to have call tracking when at all possible. And when we did the audit, we saw seven call leaks hiding in plain sight. We did not find one thing broken when we did this audit. We found multiple things. We found wrong phone numbers. Five pages were showing incorrect phone numbers. We found a broken header link. Every page, if somebody was on a mobile phone and hitting tap to call, it wasn’t opening correctly. And then there were also eighty dead pages. So Google was sending searches to pages that no longer existed, and then that was also affecting their SEO. Their search was sliding. Their impressions were down twenty-nine percent. Clicks were down twenty percent, and that’s versus the previous thirty days. However, though, we also have seasonality happening. We’re moving into the slow season in the winter, so that could have affected things as well. So we had to sort of look at all of these factors.

3:30 Wrong Numbers Hidden on Contact Pages
And specifically on the contact page, the call and text buttons were pointing to an out-of-state phone number that was since mid-2025, but the desktop was showing the right number, so we had to fix that. The homepage link, the displayed number on the homepage was correct, but the link behind it was dialing a stranger, so that’s odd. And there were also inner pages with made-up numbers, including one that was literally one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, zero, placed there by an AI content tool. And that was a mistake that we made in the past from an earlier version of our system. Our current system wouldn’t make that current mistake, but hey, AIs make mistakes. That’s why you want to audit your site, and AIs can make mistakes too. So always make sure that, you know, you do weekly or monthly audits of your website to make sure everything is set up correctly.

4:13 Eighty Dead Pages Killing SEO
The broken header link, the tap call link in the site header was missing one character, and that single typo meant that every visitor that tapped the phone number in the header was sent to an error page instead of the right number, and that was broken everywhere. So we had to fix that issue. We had eighty pages behind a vanished pricing post, and so an old redirect plugin quietly stopped working, and this meant that all the redirects that were set up weren’t working correctly. And so Google was sending people to dead pages. And separately, the site’s best-performing post, which was a pricing post, was switched to draft and vanished from Google entirely. So all this stuff affects SEO, right? And it could be intentional or unintentional, and this is why I’m kind of moving towards weekly audits or at least monthly audits of all my clients to make sure nothing bad is broken, right? Because things can happen. Plugins can break, the WordPress update can happen, or let’s say we find content cannibalization and something is drafted. I- if we have that happening, we have to sort of look at all these things and make sure that none of these things are affecting SEO.

5:13 PushRank System and Why It Matters
And most of these fixes were fixable in a day, actually an hour, ’cause we have our own system, sort of an automatic marketing system called PushRank. It started out as an SEO operating system, and now it does SEO, Google Ads, and, you know, tracks call rails. We have our own dashboard. We have our own system we’ve been building. Because really, if you’re not building AI systems at this point in 2026, you’re gonna left behind whenever systems become the norm in ’27 through 2028 and ’29, into the 30s. So we’re building our own system now, even though we’re, you know, between forty to fifty clients still, this is the time to innovate, not sit around and just use Claude to write content, right? The right people who are gonna be successful in AI are building AI systems now. So if you are working with an SEO agency and they are not talking about SEO systems or marketing systems, automation, and even if you’re writing all your content or approving content that AI is writing, then you’re working with an old-school agency that is not- Up to the times. And these are agencies are gonna get lost in the year 2028 and 2030 when AI systems become the norm. That’s one of the reasons why we’re building systems now.

6:19 Fixes Applied and Results
So we were able to fix every phone link basically within thirty minutes, or actually more like ten minutes. We were able to add Google Ads tag plus call conversion to everything. We were able to send eighty dead pages to live pages with permanent redirects, including the pricing post, and the rankings began recovering immediately, and we were able to merge duplicate search pages. We made one page the clear winner for the main dumpster rental page, and duplicates were merged into that. So all this stuff was changed super fast. All this stuff was changed from a Claude conversation, a Claude-versation, and you’re welcome to quote me on that, Claude. A Claude-versation. And we learned some lessons too, right? We fixed a contact page earlier in October. It’s the same day an older copy of the page got saved over our fix, and the wrong number came back, so nobody was rechecking that. In fact, that’s a really great idea, Claude. We should make a monthly audit. I know I’m talking randomly to Claude, but I guess Claude will be looking at this video, but we need to make a monthly audit of all of our clients. So if you are working with an SEO agency, or you’re part of one, you have your own, I would really consider making a monthly audit as part of your process. Or if you have your own business and you’re a small owner, small business owner, have your website or SEO agency do a monthly UX and SEO functionality audit of your website to make sure that nothing breaks. Because look, things break, and if things break, that can affect your leads, and we don’t want that to happen.

7:42 Manual Checklist for DIY Diagnosis
So you could diagnose these issues on your own. You can call yourself. You can read your change history. You can check your links, and you can make sure your calls are being counted. But all of this is sort of manual work, and that’s fine. No issues with doing things manual. But as systems become the norm, a system that can do this in minutes is sort of what we built, and that system allows us to go over and make sure everything is working correctly. So if you are doing stuff manually, here’s things to do. Call yourself using a cell phone and tap the number on your site. Try it on every page that shows it. Look– Read your change history. Look at your Google Ads and see what was changed, including what and when, and that’ll tell you what the budget changes. And if there’s an issue with your ad spend going up but your calls going down, then that’s probably… It’ll show up there. Clicks versus calls. Your steady clicks plus no calls really means there’s a problem functionality with the site, probably not the ad itself. And then your call tracking setup. If you have zero calls in Google Ads, the Google Ads has its own call tracking, and you probably not have that enabled. So I would definitely have that enabled and make sure you have that going good. And then check your search console, look for pages returning errors and anything switched to draft. So let’s look at some FAQs.

8:51 FAQ Calls Stopped Budget Tracking
Why did my calls stop even though I’m spending more on ads? It’s usually something between the click itself and the phone broke or calls were not being counted. So check your phone links and your change history before touching the widget. And obviously, just make sure and check everything manually too. So even if you have a system doing stuff automatically, you should be checking things manually because we can’t trust an AI to do everything perfectly, right? ‘Cause AI is developed, developed by humans, and we make mistakes as humans, right? So g-going back over and checking yourself before you wreck yourself is how you don’t screw things over. Should I raise my budget when the calls drop? Not until you know why the calls dropped. Don’t be reactive here. Do some investigation. If the clicks are steady but your calls aren’t, the budget is probably just buying more clicks that don’t become customers because you have a functional problem with your website. Why does Google Ads show zero calls when I know people have called? So Google Ads only counts calls if you set it up correctly. Calls from ad buttons, website numbers, and phone taps are tracked separately. If none of those are set up, then you’re gonna get a zero on the report. The big picture is to not guess but diagnose. So if your calls dropped and you can’t tell why, start with the checklist. Call yourself, read the change history, check your tracking, and check every tap phone link on your rental phone. And if you need help with this, if your web designer is not responsive, or they just designed a site and you’re on your own, we have an agent that can do all this stuff, and then I’ll personally go over it with you. So I’ll do a free audit, and you can get your phone links, tracking, and all your account checked by us. You can book a call. You can go to my website, PushLeads.com, or you can call eight two eight three four eight seven six eight six. And my email is jeremy@PushLeads, so feel free to email me. I really don’t accept solicitations, so if you’re on YouTube and you’re just, like, trying to pitch me to increase the channel, I’m not interested, for you, you people that are trying to pitch me. I just wanna show in front of people that need help. And so you can call me at eight two eight three four eight seven six eight six. Again, I’m Jeremy Ashburn with PushLeads. I help small businesses get more leads without struggle and frustration.