Your Google or Facebook ads are not working: a check for SaaS

"Cheap clicks and loads of them.. the dashboard looks alive, and then you go looking for an actual human on the other side and there's nobody." A founder wrote that on r/startups after €174 of Reddit ads brought 1,579 clicks and "basically zero customers". Another founder wrote on X: "I'm stopping Google Ads. It's not working for me. I spent $40 on ads yes, it's a small investment, but I got zero ROI."

"My ads are not working" can mean two different problems. Either the ads don't run at all, or they run and nobody signs up. Google's own results for "google ads not working" and "facebook ads not working" mostly answer the first. Founders usually mean the second. This guide covers both, in the order that finds the cause with the least money.

I have had the second problem with my own software: clicks, but few sign-ups. When I looked for what was really wrong, I found three things. The ads reached the wrong audience. The page did not match the ad. And the offer was weak, with no reason to act. Those three are the first checks in this guide.

This guide is for SaaS founders who run Google search ads or Facebook and Instagram ads and don't get customers from them. You get:

• the quick checks for ads that don't run, from Google's and Meta's own help pages
• six checks for ads that run with no sign-ups, in the order to do them
• what other founders found when they went looking, with links to their posts
• the mistakes that make a fixable test look like a dead channel

Meta runs Facebook and Instagram ads from one Ads Manager. In this guide "Facebook ads" and "Meta ads" mean the same thing.

First, find out which problem you have

Look at two numbers: spend and clicks. If spend is close to zero, your ads are not running, and the fix is in the ad account. If money is going out and clicks are coming in but sign-ups are not, the ads run fine and the problem is after the click.

The two problems need different fixes, and mixing them up costs money. One founder on r/SaaS rebuilt his landing page for an ad that Google barely showed. His verdict afterwards: "Page work is the most expensive step and the least likely to be the constraint." The page was fine. The ad was not running.

Two different problems

Not running and not converting need different fixes.

Check spend

Spend near zero

The ad account

status, review, budget, bid

Spend and clicks, no sign-ups

After the click

audience, page, offer, tracking, wasted spend, data

If your ads are not running

Both platforms tell you why an ad isn't running, in one column most founders never read. On Meta it is the Delivery column. On Google it is the Status column. Read that before you change the budget, the bid or the page.

Meta: read the Delivery column

Meta's troubleshooting page starts in the same place: "Start by reviewing the Delivery column status in Meta Ads Manager." There are three states to know.

• Error. "the ad (or that ad's campaign or ad set) is encountering a problem." Hover over the status to see the problem and how to fix it.
• Pending. "the ad is not running because it is either in draft, pending review, or scheduled for a later time."
• Off. "Ads turn off when you turn them off, when an automated rule you created turns them off, or when they are scheduled to end."

If the column says "Active" and the ad still barely spends, the ad is running but losing auctions. The usual causes are a small budget or a bid limit set too low. Meta's budget page gives one rule: "If you use the cost per result goal bid strategy, your daily budget should be at least 5 times the amount of your cost per result goal."

Google: start with Google's own list

Google keeps a help page called How to fix Google Ads Search campaign not running or low traffic. It lists "12 common reasons why your Search ads aren't running or are getting low traffic". In short: account or billing issues, the date range you are looking at, ad groups or ads that are paused or disapproved, low bids, low budget, targeting that is too narrow, campaigns that compete with each other, lost impression share, broken conversion tracking, ad quality, other advertisers in the same auction, and features that pause a campaign.

Two lines on that page save the most panic. A new ad may simply be waiting: "Most ads are reviewed within 24-48 hours. However, for new accounts or specific formats like image or video, it can take up to 5 business days for review." And a new campaign on automated bidding moves around before it settles: "there may be performance fluctuations or changes in spend as Google Ads learns to optimize towards your set goal."

When a higher bid does not fix it

The most useful founder post on this is from a solo SaaS founder who buys his own Google traffic. He raised his bid above Google's suggested bid and got "Six impressions. Not six clicks." He found the cause in "a column I had never read, the Status column on the keyword: Eligible (Limited): Rarely shown (low Quality Score)."

His point is worth knowing before you spend more: "raising the bid does not fix Quality Score. Quality Score only recalculates once you get impressions, and you cannot get impressions because the score is low." In his case, a different wording of the same search served normally, with the same page and the same ad. His advice for small SaaS accounts: "read the Status column before the performance columns."

If your ads run but nobody signs up

Start with the three checks that cost nothing but an hour of reading: who sees the ad, whether the page keeps the ad's promise, and whether the offer gives a reason to act now. Then check tracking, wasted spend and whether you have enough data to judge at all.

The first three checks are the ones I found in my own ads, so they come first here. The last three need your analytics and the ad platform's reports. One exception to the order: if your numbers look impossible, for example far more clicks than page visits, jump to check 4 first, because nothing else can be judged on broken data.

Six checks, in order

Fix the first broken step before you touch the next one.

1. 1Audience
2. 2The page matches the ad
3. 3Offer and a reason to act
4. 4Tracking
5. 5Wasted spend
6. 6Enough data

1. The audience: are the right people clicking?

This was one of the three problems in my own ads. They reached the wrong audience.

Clicks are easy to buy. Clicks from people who have your problem and can pay for the fix are not. A commenter in r/ProductMarketing put it in one line: "It's easy to run up clicks, getting the right people to click is the hard part." The post he answered had "High clicks, high bounce rate" and no demo bookings from about $600 of LinkedIn ads.

Each platform goes wrong here in its own way.

• On Google, the keyword decides who comes. Broad terms bring browsers. A commenter in r/SaaS warned that if you bid on terms like 'project management software' or 'CRM tool', "you compete with funded companies, pay $10+/click for tourists who don't have your specific pain."
• On Meta, the ad decides who comes. Meta treats age, gender and interests as suggestions: "Suggestions don't always constrain your audience" (Meta Business Help Center). So an ad that could be for anyone gets clicked by anyone. Our post on Facebook ads for SaaS covers this in detail.

How to check it:

• Split sign-ups by source: each campaign, each keyword, each placement. One commenter in r/b2bmarketing put it plainly: "Segment the conversion rate by source before you touch the page."
• Look at the few people who did sign up. Are they the buyer you meant? Same job, same size of company, same problem?
• Write down the one buyer you want before you judge the ads. Our free ICP Builder takes ten short steps: who they are, what they want, what stops them and the words they use. Compare that card with the people who click.

The fix is usually narrower, not broader. On Google, tighter keywords and negative keywords. On Meta, an ad that names the buyer and the problem in its first line, so the wrong people scroll past.

2. The page: does it say what the ad said?

This was another problem in my own ads. The page did not match the ad.

A commenter in r/SaaS gave the clearest rule: "your ad is a promise, your landing page is the proof." He added: "If someone clicks from a keyword-intent ad and lands on a generic homepage, conversion will always crater. The gap is between the promise in the ad and the immediate value on landing."

The mismatch is not only about the homepage. It can be one word. The marketer in the r/ProductMarketing thread got this feedback: "the ad copy, 'scale your onboarding', made them think it was a new fancy ai tool. When they land on the page, they realized it was a $100/mo software." Another reader of the same page wrote: "I thought it was for onboarding new employees. It wasn't until I was below the fold it was for customers." The product onboards customers. The words let people picture something else.

The promise has to hold past the landing page too. A commenter in r/b2bmarketing wrote: "If the page says 'free trial' and the signup says 'book a demo', or the pricing appears for the first time on the form, people bail. The signup page should feel like the same conversation continuing."

How to check it:

• Put the ad and the page side by side. Does the page's headline repeat the ad's promise in the same words?
• Is the button on the page the same next step the ad offered? A trial in the ad means a trial on the page.
• Read the page as someone who saw only the ad. In five seconds, can they say what the product does and who it is for?
• On Google, Quality Score checks this too. Google's advice: "Make sure your landing page is relevant to your ads and keywords, loads quickly, and provides a good user experience."

Keeping one message from the ad to the page to the first e-mails is the work on our messaging and funnel page. We take the words from your buyers and your sales calls, and the ad, the page and the onboarding e-mails all use the same ones.

3. The offer: is there a reason to act now?

The last of the three in my own ads was a weak offer, with no reason to act. A click that ends in "maybe later" rarely comes back, so the offer has to give a reason to act on the first visit.

An offer is more than the product. It is what someone gets, what it costs them, what the next step is and why they should take it now. Ads put that offer in front of strangers, and a stranger needs a clear reason.

The r/startups founder tested three versions of his offer, and his post shows how much it changes the result. A free trial brought two sign-ups who never came back. His conclusion: "free mostly drags in the people who were never going to pay or log in even once." A paid offer with "full money-back if you don't see results" got over a thousand cheap clicks and "Converted exactly zero people." His case was Reddit ads to a B2B product, so it is one case, not a rule. It shows that the offer is a separate thing to test, apart from the ad and the page.

How to check it:

• Write the offer in one sentence: what they get, by when, for what. If you can't, the ad can't either.
• Ask what a buyer gives up by waiting a week. If the answer is "nothing", that is the problem.
• Look at the first step you ask for. A demo call with a stranger is a big step. A free account, a short trial with a clear first result, or a tool that answers one question now are smaller ones.
• Give a real reason to act now, never a made-up one. A fake countdown timer costs you trust you will need later.

4. Tracking: is the sign-up counted at all?

Before you blame the ad, make sure the sign-ups you are missing are really missing. Broken tracking makes a working campaign look dead. It also starves the platform of the data it optimizes on.

Google's help page lists it as one of its 12 reasons: "If your campaign is using Automated bidding to optimize towards conversions, but isn't getting sufficient conversion data or your conversion tracking isn't set up correctly, your ad may have limited serving."

The r/startups founder found a second kind of gap. The ad platform counted 1,579 clicks. In a reply, he wrote: "I just checked analytics and it shows 81 page visits out of those clicks, 44 for th last wave." Another commenter said of feed ads on phones: "a huge chunk of traffic is just missclick." In r/b2bmarketing, a commenter warned that if a chunk of the clicks are bots, "the <0.1% number is not a funnel problem, it's a measurement problem".

How to check it:

• Compare clicks in the ad platform with sessions from that source in your analytics, for the same days. A big gap means accidental clicks, bots or a page that loads too slowly.
• Sign up yourself from the ad's link and watch the event arrive: Events Manager on Meta, the conversions page on Google.
• Follow one test user from click to sign-up to paid, in your own database. Ads Manager stops at the click or the sign-up. Only your billing knows who paid.

5. Wasted spend: search terms and placements

Part of every budget goes to searches and placements you never meant to buy. Both platforms show you where, if you open the right report.

On Google, open the search terms report. Google describes it as a way "to know how your ads performed when triggered by actual searches" (Google Ads Help). The searches people typed can be quite different from your keywords. Google's own advice: "If a search term isn't relevant enough to the products or services you offer, add it as a negative keyword." A commenter in r/SaaS kept it shorter: "Add negatives constantly."

On Meta, use the Breakdown menu in Ads Manager and pick Placement. Meta places ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and its Audience Network, and they don't all bring the same people. After $867 and no customers, founder Daniel Smidstrup wrote: "Then I broke it down by placement and found out where my money actually went."

6. Enough data: did the test run long enough?

Some ads "don't work" because the test ended before it could say anything. Before you call a channel dead, check whether you had enough results to judge.

A founder in r/SaaS spent around 200€ in 10 days on Google Ads and got "2 signups started but both abonded". A commenter answered with the math: "€200 over 10 days is too small to conclude anything either way. 60 clicks (2k × 3%) gives you maybe 2 signup starts, which is exactly what you got. Two isn't statistically anything."

Meta has its own threshold. An ad set leaves the learning phase "after about 50 results in the week after the ad set's last significant edit", and until then "ad sets are less stable and usually have a higher CPA" (Meta Business Help Center). Each significant edit starts the count again.

The Zingylabs account on X described the usual short test:

Founders tell us "we tried ads, they didn't work" about once a week.

Here's what "tried" usually means:

• $400 spent
• Over 11 days
• 3 creatives, no variants
• No landing page (or worse: the homepage)

That's not a failed test. That's gambling with extra steps.

How to check it: before the test, write down how many results you need to judge it and what each one costs. If the budget can't buy that many, choose a cheaper event to count, run longer, or test something else first. Our Facebook ads post works through that math with a real founder's numbers.

Google and Meta fail in different ways

Google shows ads to people who searched. Meta shows ads to people who are scrolling. So the same symptom, clicks with no sign-ups, usually has a different cause on each.

This table is our summary of Google's and Meta's help pages and the founder threads linked in this guide.

Same symptom, different cause

Google brings searchers. Meta brings scrollers.

Google

Search box→Keyword→Page

Open firstSearch terms report

Meta

Feed→Ad→Page

Open firstBreakdown by placement

Mistakes that make a fixable test look dead

Judging by the ad platform's numbers alone

Changing five things at once

Rebuilding the page when the ad isn't running

Raising the bid to fix a quality problem

Sending ads to the homepage

Editing every day

Where this guide falls short

• The founder posts are self-reported. Some are about Reddit or LinkedIn ads, not Google or Meta. We use them for what happens after the click, which works the same way whatever the platform.
• My three causes come from my own ads. They are a starting order, not a study.
• If all six checks pass and still nobody pays, the problem may be the product or the price. The marketer in the r/ProductMarketing thread asked exactly that: "is it the marketing (wrong audience, poor messaging) or something else, possibly fundamental with the product?" This guide doesn't answer that question.
• Google's and Meta's help pages were checked on 22 Oct 2026. Both change often.