Short answer: in most cases the ads did not stop working — the measurement stopped working. Spend continues, clicks continue, and the conversion column goes to zero or near-zero. Before you touch a bid, a budget or a keyword, confirm that a conversion could still be recorded if it happened. Changing campaigns to fix a reporting problem is how a healthy account gets dismantled.
Here are the five causes we actually find, roughly in the order they turn up.
1. The conversion action was changed, replaced or removed
This is the most common cause and the least obvious, because it rewrites history.
When a conversion action is deleted or swapped out in Google Ads — a new form, a new phone system, a website rebuild, an agency handover — Google frequently stops reporting the old action's conversions for past periods too. Your spend history stays perfectly intact. Your conversion history develops a hole.
We manage one account with eleven years of continuous Google Ads data. Its spend is complete for every one of those years. Its conversions are missing entirely for four consecutive years — roughly $175,000 of spend with nothing recorded against it. The campaigns were running the whole time and producing work. What changed was the conversion action, and Google simply stopped reporting the old one backwards.
If your conversions dropped to zero on a specific date rather than declining over a few weeks, look at your Google Ads conversion actions and check the "Status" and "Last conversion recorded" columns first. A cliff edge is a tracking event. A slope is a market event.
2. The tag is installed but not firing
Installed and firing are not the same thing, and almost every reporting tool will tell you the tag is "present."
A Google Tag Manager container can sit in your page source, perfectly valid, while the conversion tag inside it never fires — because a trigger condition changed, a form's success URL changed, or a consent banner blocks it until someone clicks accept. The container loads. The tag does not.
This one is worth being precise about, because it also runs the other way: a page-source scan that finds no tags can be wrong. GTM injects tags at runtime, so a site can be fully tracked while its raw HTML shows nothing. That is why "I couldn't see it" is never the same as "it's broken."
The only reliable check is Google Tag Assistant in preview mode, running the real conversion path on the live site — submit the form, click the call button — and confirming the tag reports as fired. Not present. Fired.
3. Your website went down, or started blocking
Ads keep spending against a dead site. Google will happily send traffic to a page that returns a 500 error, and the conversion count goes to zero for the most boring possible reason.
Related and more common: your site is fine for humans but started blocking automated traffic. A security plugin or CDN rule begins answering some requests with a 403, and depending on what got caught, tracking requests can fail while the page itself loads normally.
Check that the homepage and the specific landing pages your ads point to load correctly, from outside your own network. Your office IP is often whitelisted, so the page that works for you may not work for a visitor.
4. You run Local Services Ads, and only charged leads count
If you run LSA, this one is structural rather than broken.
Local Services Ads report charged leads. When Google credits a lead back to you — wrong number, out of area, spam — that lead disappears from your conversion count even though the phone genuinely rang. So a month with a lot of disputed leads reads as a conversion drop, and a heavy LSA account can look dramatically worse than it performed.
Before you conclude LSA stopped working, open the Local Services lead inbox and count the actual leads. The gap between what the phone did and what the conversion column says is often the whole story.
5. The conversions were never being tracked in the first place
Sometimes nothing stopped, because nothing ever started. This is more common than anyone in the industry likes to admit.
We ran an automated scan of 2,961 local business websites, loading each one in a real browser rather than reading its page source. Of those, 714 were confirmed to be running ads. Of that 714, 214 — about 30% — had no conversion tracking of any kind. Roughly one in three businesses we could confirm was actively buying traffic had no mechanism to record what that traffic did.
Those advertisers are not measuring badly. They are not measuring at all. Every optimization decision in those accounts is being made on clicks.
Diagnose in this order
- Did it drop on a date, or over weeks? A cliff is a tracking event; a slope is a market event.
- Check conversion actions in Google Ads — status, and last conversion recorded.
- Run Tag Assistant on the live site and complete a real conversion. Confirm fired, not present.
- Load your landing pages from outside your network.
- If LSA, open the lead inbox and compare it to the conversion count.
- Only then look at bids, budgets, keywords and competition.
The order matters. Every hour spent optimizing against a broken measurement makes the account worse, because you are optimizing toward a number that is no longer describing reality — and the changes you make while blind are the ones that are hardest to unwind later.
The honest summary
Conversions stopping is usually a measurement failure, not a marketing failure. The fastest way to know which one you are dealing with is to confirm that a conversion could be recorded today, and only then ask whether one is being recorded. Most agencies check that in the wrong order.
Berk Hospitality Group is a Google Partner agency in Scottsdale, Arizona. The scan figures above come from our own automated verification of 2,961 local business websites, each loaded in a real browser, as of August 2026.