You’ve just increased your Google Ads budget by 20%, expecting a flood of new conversions. Instead, your spend shoots up while your results stay disappointingly flat.
Many companies assume that raising their budget will naturally lead to more conversions. In practice, this isn’t always the case.
In this article, we’ll look at the most common reasons why increasing your budget doesn’t produce better results. Understanding these factors will help you avoid wasting money when scaling your Google Ads campaigns. Plus, we’ll share practical tips on what to check when your conversions stall.
Lost impression share
Impression share is the percentage of times your ads were displayed compared to how often they were eligible to be displayed. It’s one of the first things to check when evaluating whether a higher budget could bring in more conversions.
If your Lost impression share due to budget metric is 0%, then raising your budget is unlikely to have any impact. It means there are simply no new impressions to be had.
That said, Lost impression share due to budget doesn’t guarantee more conversions. To predict the impact of a new budget, you’ll need to look closely at your impression share data and likely conversion changes at different budget levels.
For a deeper dive into how to use impression share data to get more conversions, check out this dedicated article.
There can be several reasons why you might see Lost impression share due to budget, and still not get more conversions with more budget. Match type and bid method play a big role — let’s look at those next.
Broad match & bid methods
Broad match allows your ads to show for a wide range of search terms. This includes variations of your keywords, words on your landing page, in the user’s search history, or other keywords in your ad group.
When you increase your budget while using broad match, you may start to show for new search terms. If these additional search terms aren’t relevant to your business, then you’ll often spend significantly more without any meaningful lift in conversions.
Your bid method plays a key role here:
With tROAS or tCPA bidding, broad match will often get more conversions as you raise your budget.
With max clicks, tCPC, or CPC bidding, broad match doesn’t use conversion signals as it expands to new search terms. Additional budget may lead to more traffic, but not necessarily better performance.
For instance, this account is using max conversion bidding, and broad match performs significantly worse than the other match types.
Conversely, this account is using target ROAS bidding, and broad match is performing as well as phrase match.
When scaling your budget, if you’re using broad match and don’t see an increase in conversions, make sure you’ve applied target CPA or target ROAS bidding.
Bid methods with other match types
Exact and phrase match also rely on specific bid methods. However, since exact and phrase match don’t expand to additional queries as aggressively as broad match does, they usually work well with any conversion-focused bid method.
If you raise your budgets and don’t see an increase in conversions, check if you’re using:
Target CPA
Target ROAS
Max conversions, or
Max revenue
Assuming there’s a lost impression share due to budget, any of these bid methods should yield more conversions as your budget grows.
Sometimes, raising your budget does bring more leads, but your team can’t handle the higher volume. In lead generation, this often means unanswered calls:
No one answers the phone
The caller hangs up after a long wait
Too many leads for reps to call everyone back
In e-commerce, the issue is often inventory. If you get more traffic for items that aren’t in stock, you rarely see more conversions.
Before increasing your budget, make sure you’re ready to handle a higher volume of leads or product sales. Otherwise, that extra money won’t deliver better results.
Quality scores
Low quality scores can prevent your ads from showing more often. This can happen because your ad rank is too low to qualify for the auction, or because Google doesn’t see your offer as relevant to the searcher.
If you raise your budget but don’t see more conversions (or even clicks or impressions), take a look at your quality scores.
For example, one company was struggling to spend more, so they reworked their ads with more pinning and testing. As a result, their expected CTR increased nicely, and their ads started showing much more often.
If you’re looking to boost your quality scores, check out our ultimate guide.
Campaign cannibalization
Another scenario arises when a company increases its budgets for several campaigns at once. One campaign may receive significantly more impressions than the others. If your worst-performing campaign gets most of the new impressions, your better ones can suffer.
This is most common when you raise budgets for both Performance Max and Search at the same time.
Many business owners see low conversion numbers and follow Google’s recommendations, which often revolve around budget. The company increases its ad spend, but the conversions still don’t arrive.
If your account isn’t converting well from the start, adding more budget usually won’t change that. The first step is to audit your account and ensure you have a solid foundation before scaling the budget.
Need help? Adalysis offers a free Google Ads audit that provides valuable insights and performance recommendations in just a few minutes.
Wrap-up
You want to ensure you’re getting the most out of your PPC spend, but we’ve seen that raising budgets can backfire if you haven’t got the right foundation. Run through this checklist before investing more money:
Check your lost impression share due to budget
If it’s 0%, more budget won’t help
Review your match types and bid methods
Make sure you’ve got the right bid method, especially with broad match
Audit your operational capacity
Can you actually handle more leads or orders?
Boost your quality scores
Low scores limit your visibility regardless of budget
Look for campaign cannibalization
One campaign might be stealing impressions from better performers
Assess your baseline performance
You can’t scale what doesn’t already work
