Google Ads Isn't Broken. Your Landing Pages Are.

When click volume tanks, most advertisers start poking around in Google Ads looking for what broke. They tweak bids, fiddle with keywords, maybe pause a few underperformers.

That's backwards.

A click drop is a symptom. The actual problem usually lives on your website.

Google Is Grading Your Website. Most Businesses Are Failing.

Quality Score isn't some arbitrary number Google invented to annoy you. It's their way of telling you whether your landing page is doing its job.

Three components drive Quality Score:

1. Expected click-through rate

2. Ad relevance

3. Landing page experience

Two of those three have nothing to do with your ad copy. They're about what happens after the click.

Google's algorithm knows when users hit your page, get confused, and bounce. When that keeps happening, Google stops showing your ads as often. Your impressions drop. Your clicks follow.

This isn't a Google Ads problem. It's a website problem you're paying to discover.

Bad Landing Pages Cost More Than Lost Clicks

Here's what most businesses miss. A low Quality Score doesn't just reduce your visibility. It increases your cost per click. Google literally charges you more to show ads to fewer people because your website experience is subpar.

According to Google's own documentation, higher quality ads cost less per click than lower quality ads. Multiple studies have shown that a Quality Score of 10 can cut your CPC by up to 50% compared to a score of 5. On the flip side, a Quality Score of 1 can raise your CPC by 400%.

Run those numbers for a quarter. Then a year. The amount you're overpaying because your landing page loads slowly, has unclear messaging, or buries the call-to-action, that's real margin you're handing to competitors.

How This Shows Up Across Your Organization

A website that underperforms doesn't just hurt your ad metrics. It creates problems that ripple through the entire business. Different teams experience it differently, but they're all describing the same root cause.

Sales says leads are garbage

If you're in B2B, you've heard this one: "Marketing is sending us garbage leads."

Sales says the leads aren't qualified. They don't have budget. They're not decision-makers. They ghost after the first call. Marketing points at the MQL numbers and says the volume is fine.

Both are looking at the wrong thing.

When your landing pages are weak with confusing value propositions, buried CTAs, or friction-filled forms, you're filtering out the high-intent buyers. They land on your page, don't immediately see what they need, and leave. They have options. They don't have patience.

Who sticks around? The tire-kickers. The people with time to waste. The ones who'll fill out a form because they're curious, not because they're ready to buy.

Your website is selecting for the wrong audience. Sales is dealing with the downstream consequences.

Finance can't see marketing ROI

CFOs don't hate marketing. They hate spending money on things that can't be measured.

When finance looks at the ad budget and can't connect it to revenue, they start asking hard questions. And most marketing teams don't have good answers because they're reporting on the wrong metrics.

Impressions. Clicks. CTR. Cost per lead. These are activity metrics. They tell you what marketing did, not what it produced.

Here's what happens when your landing pages underperform:

• You pay more per click because Quality Score is low.

• You get fewer conversions because the page doesn't do its job.

• The leads you do get are lower quality because the page didn't filter properly.

• Sales takes longer to close deals or doesn't close them at all.

• Revenue attribution gets murky because the funnel is leaking at every stage.

Finance sees ad spend going up and revenue staying flat. They're not wrong to ask questions.

The fix isn't better reporting. It's fixing the thing that's broken.

Ecommerce sales are slumping

For ecommerce, this shows up differently but comes from the same place:

• Traffic looks fine. Maybe even up.

• Sales are flat or declining.

• Average order value is dropping.

• Cart abandonment is climbing.

• Return customer rate is sliding.

The diagnosis is usually the same. The post-click experience isn't working.

Slow page loads kill conversions. Google found that as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce probability increases by 32%. From 1 to 5 seconds, it increases by 90%. Every second costs you money.

Confusing product pages lead to abandoned carts. If customers can't quickly understand what they're getting, how to buy it, and why they should trust you, they leave.

Poor mobile experience filters out impulse buyers. More than half of ecommerce traffic is mobile. If your checkout is clunky on a phone, those sales go to someone else.

And here's the Quality Score connection: Google is measuring these same behaviors. When visitors bounce, when they don't engage, when they leave without converting—Google notices. Your landing page experience score drops. Your CPCs go up. You're paying more to attract customers your site is actively pushing away.

The Metric That Actually Matters = Customer Lifetime Value

Clicks are a vanity metric. Everyone knows this. But most businesses stop the analysis at cost-per-lead or cost-per-acquisition.

Customer Lifetime Value is where the real math happens. A $200 lead that turns into a $50,000 client relationship over three years is a completely different animal than a $50 lead that churns in six months.

When your landing pages are weak, you're not just losing clicks—you're systematically filtering out high-intent buyers who have low tolerance for friction.

If your sales team says lead quality has dropped off, and your PPC manager says Quality Scores are sliding, and your ecommerce conversion rate is falling, those are the same problem described from different seats in the building. The website is repelling your best potential customers and attracting your worst ones.

SEO and PPC Are Diagnosing the Same Problem

Here's the part that makes both SEO specialists and PPC managers really uncomfortable: your organic performance and your paid performance are connected.

• Same landing pages.

• Same user experience.

• Same conversion bottlenecks.

When your SEO team reports that organic rankings are slipping, and your PPC team reports that Quality Scores are dropping, and your sales team mentions that lead quality seems off—they're all describing the same problem from different angles.

Google's core algorithm and their ads algorithm are both trying to surface the best results for users. If your pages provide a poor experience, you get penalized in both channels. The traffic just costs more in one column than the other.

Businesses that treat SEO and PPC as separate silos miss this entirely. They'll spend six figures optimizing ad campaigns while ignoring the landing pages those ads point to.

Think of it this way: sending paid traffic to a website that isn't optimized for conversions is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. Fix the bucket first, then turn up the flow.

Why This Is Getting Harder to Fix

Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough. The ad platforms themselves are becoming harder to manage. And it's getting worse.

Google launched more than 60 AI-powered changes to the ads platform in 2025 alone. According to one analysis, the pace of algorithm changes accelerated 3.8x compared to 2024. That's not a typo. Nearly four times faster.

In the last 18 months, Google has:

• Phased out Enhanced CPC bidding

• Deprecated call-only ads

• Changed the entire campaign creation interface to default to Performance Max

• Introduced AI Max for Search as part of a new "Power Pack" strategy that's replacing what they were pushing just a year ago.

• They sunset Expanded Text Ads.

• They're consolidating Dynamic Search Ads into AI Max.

The features PPC managers learned three years ago either don't exist anymore or work completely differently.

This creates a brutal reality for anyone managing paid media. The skills that made you effective in 2022 are already outdated. The tactics that worked six months ago may not work today.

The platforms want you using their automation:

• Performance Max

• AI Max

• Smart Bidding

These aren't optional add-ons anymore. Google is systematically removing manual controls and pushing advertisers toward machine learning-driven campaigns. The interface itself now defaults to automated campaign types when you try to create something new.

For businesses, this means two things:

• First, you need PPC people who are constantly upskilling. The learning curve never flattens.

• Second, and this connects directly to the website problem, these AI-driven campaign types need strong signals to work properly.

If your landing pages don't convert, if your tracking is broken, if your data quality is poor, the automation will optimize toward the wrong outcomes. You'll spend more and get less.

The AI doesn't fix a bad website. It just finds more expensive ways to send traffic to it.

Why Internal Teams Can't Keep Up Anymore

This isn't a knock on in-house marketers. It's math.

A typical internal marketing team manages one company's ad accounts. Maybe two if there's a sister brand. They see one set of data, one vertical, one audience. When Google rolls out a change, they learn about it, test it on their account, and figure out what works through trial and error. That takes time. And budget.

An agency immersed in paid media every day sees patterns across dozens of accounts, multiple verticals, and varying budget levels simultaneously. When Google pushes a new feature or deprecates an old one, agencies see the impact in real time across a portfolio.

They know what's working in ecommerce, B2B, local service businesses, and manufacturing—not because they read about it, but because they're in the accounts watching it happen.

The knowledge compounds. A lesson learned in one account gets applied to twenty others the same week. Testing that would take an internal team six months happens in six days because the sample size is bigger and the feedback loops are faster.

With platform changes accelerating the way they are, this isn't a nice-to-have anymore. The gap between what an internal team can reasonably track and what's actually happening in the platforms is widening every quarter.

That doesn't mean internal teams are useless. Nobody knows your business, your customers, and your competitive landscape better than the people who live it every day. But trying to stay current on Google's AI updates, Meta's algorithm shifts, new campaign types, deprecated features, and changing best practices — while also running the rest of marketing — is a losing battle.

The businesses getting the best results right now are the ones combining internal brand knowledge with external platform expertise.

• The internal team owns strategy, messaging, and customer insight.

• The agency handles the platform mechanics, stays current on changes, and brings cross-industry pattern recognition that no single-company team can match.

It's not about replacing your team. It's about not asking them to do something that's become structurally impossible.

What Actually Moves the Needle

Stop treating click drops as a bidding problem.

1. Audit your landing pages first. 

Not the copy, the experience. Load time. Mobile responsiveness. Clarity of the offer. Friction in the conversion path. If bounce rates are high and time-on-page is low, that's the signal. Google is watching those same behaviors when it calculates your landing page experience score.

2. Connect your marketing data to revenue data. 

If you can't trace a click through to closed revenue and eventual CLV, you're optimizing for intermediate metrics that may or may not matter. Build the attribution. Do the work.

3. Align your SEO and PPC strategies around page performance. 

If a page isn't converting paid traffic well, it's probably not converting organic traffic well either. Fix the page, and both channels improve.

4. Make sure your PPC management is keeping pace with platform changes. 

The ad platforms are evolving faster than most teams can track. If your campaigns are still structured the way they were two years ago, you're probably leaving money on the table—or worse, actively wasting it. Be honest about whether your internal team has the bandwidth to stay current. If they don't, find an agency partner who's in the platforms every day across multiple verticals.

5. Focus on lead quality, not lead volume. 

A 20% drop in clicks with steady conversion rates and higher close rates downstream isn't a problem—it's progress. You're paying for fewer, better prospects.

Where Does This Leave You?

Most businesses would rather blame Google's algorithm, rising CPCs, or increased competition than admit their website isn't up to standard.

Competition and costs are real pressures. The latest WordStream data shows CPCs increased for 87% of industries in 2025, with an average increase of nearly 13%. But those pressures affect everyone. The businesses winning in paid search right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets, they're the ones whose websites actually convert.

When your clicks drop, start with the landing page. The answer is usually sitting there.

Want to see how your website performance connects to your paid media results? Let's look at your actual data.

Sources

• Google Ads Help, "About ad quality"

• Google Ads Help, "About Quality Score for Search campaigns"

• WordStream, "How to Reduce Your Cost Per Conversion by 16-80%"

• WordStream, "Google Ads Benchmarks 2025"

• WordStream, "11 Biggest Google Ads Updates of 2025"

• GROAS, "Google AI Updates for Advertisers: Week of December 7, 2025"

• PPC land, "Google phases out call-only ads by February 2027 in push toward automation"

• PPC land, "Google Ads marks 25 years with shift from manual campaigns to AI automation"

• Think with Google, "Find Out How You Stack Up to New Industry Benchmarks for Mobile Page Speed"