You run Google Ads for a business in the US, the UK or Australia. The campaigns are set up, the budget is moving, and the reports show clicks. Then a customer mentions that the page they landed on had a broken form, or you notice the lead count is oddly flat while spend is not. Nobody changed the ads. Something on the website did.
Ads and landing pages fail in different places, and only one of them sends you a notification. The campaign has dashboards, alerts and an account manager if you pay for one. The page behind it has none of that unless somebody looks. This post is a routine for monthly landing page checks for Google Ads: what to open, what to click, what to write down, and what to do when something is off. It takes less time than most monthly meetings.
Why the page drifts while the ad stays put
An ad is a fixed thing. Its text, its final URL and its budget stay as you left them. A landing page is a living thing. A plugin updates and changes how a form behaves. Someone edits the page and moves the button. A cookie banner is added and covers the phone number on small screens. A hosting change slows the first load. An SSL certificate is renewed on the wrong hostname.
None of these is dramatic. Each one quietly lowers the share of clicks that turn into enquiries, and you keep paying for every click. That is why a check on the page belongs next to the usual look at the ad account, not instead of it.
Catching this drift is routine work for any team that looks after your site each month. The page on web maintenance services from an India-based team shows what that monthly work covers, so you can judge whether your paid pages would sit inside it.
Step zero: make a list of the pages that matter
Before the first check, build a short sheet with one row per landing page in use. In Google Ads, the final URL sits at the ad level (and at the asset level for sitelinks, so those need a row too). A shared spreadsheet with these columns is enough:
- The full web address exactly as it appears in the ad, including any tracking parameters.
- Which campaign or ad group sends traffic to it.
- What counts as a win on that page: a form sent, a phone tap, a booking, a purchase.
- Who owns the page, and who can change it.
Pages come and go. When a campaign is paused, mark the row; when a new one starts, add it the same day. An out-of-date sheet is worse than none.
If your ads are managed by someone else, this sheet is also a small test of that arrangement. You should be able to get it from them in a few minutes, and the account itself should be in your name, not under an agency’s login.
Monthly landing page checks for Google Ads, in the order a customer meets the page
Do this on a phone first, on mobile data rather than office wifi, and then repeat the important steps on a laptop. Most paid clicks for local services arrive on a phone, and a page that behaves on your desk can still stumble on a train.
1. Load it from the ad, not from your bookmarks
Click the live ad if you can find it, or paste the final URL into a private browser window. A private window matters because your normal browser has cookies, saved logins and cached files that hide problems. Look for:
- A redirect that sends you somewhere other than the page the ad promised. This happens after a redesign, after changing a page address, or when a security plugin is set up with a rule that is too eager.
- A browser warning about the connection or the certificate.
- A wait before anything useful appears. You do not need a stopwatch; you need to notice whether you would have stayed.
- Whether the headline still matches what the ad said. An ad about a Saturday appointment leading to a page that no longer mentions Saturdays is a quiet mismatch.
2. Check that tracking survives the trip
If auto-tagging is on in Google Ads, the click arrives with an extra identifier added to the web address. A redirect, a caching rule or a badly written link can drop that identifier before the page loads, and then the conversion cannot be tied back to the click. Compare the address in your browser after the page loads with the one you clicked. If parameters have vanished, tell whoever maintains the site; that is a fixable cause rather than a mystery.
Then confirm that your measurement tool still sees you. If you use Tag Manager, its preview mode shows which tags fire on the page. If you use GA4, open real-time reporting while you click around. When the numbers are blank, our checklist on GA4 not tracking walks through the usual causes in order.
3. Run the conversion yourself, end to end
This is the check that finds the most money. Fill in the form with an obviously fake name and a mailbox you control. Then confirm all of these, not just the first:
- The page shows a clear thank-you message or moves to a thank-you page.
- The notification email reaches the right inbox, and not the spam folder.
- The entry appears wherever you keep leads: the dashboard, a spreadsheet, the CRM.
- The conversion shows up in your ad platform, in the reports, after the usual delay.
Forms tend to fail quietly. The page says thank you, the visitor leaves happy, and the message goes nowhere because the site’s outgoing mail stopped being accepted. The routine in how to test WordPress forms before your customers do covers the extra cases such as required fields, file uploads and attachments.
If phone calls are your main goal, call the number from the page. Tap it on a phone, because a number written as plain text is not always clickable. If the call goes to voicemail at a time you thought was covered, you have found something worth knowing.
4. Look at it the way a stressed customer would
Scroll the page on a small screen with one thumb. A few things go wrong again and again:
- A pop-up or banner covers the main button, or cannot be closed.
- A sticky bar eats a third of the screen.
- The form fields are fiddly, or the keyboard hides the submit button.
- Images jump around while the page loads, so you tap the wrong thing.
- An old offer, date or phone number is still on the page.
The last one is easy to miss because you stopped seeing the page months ago. Read it as if you had never been there.
Where the web team and the ads team trip over each other
The most expensive problems sit in the gap between two people who each assume the other has it covered. The person running campaigns assumes the page is stable. The person maintaining the site does not know which pages receive paid traffic, so an edit or a plugin update goes ahead without anyone testing the form afterwards.
Two habits close that gap. First, share the sheet from step zero with whoever looks after the site, so they know which pages are being paid for. Second, when the website team plans a larger change, such as a theme update, a new caching setup or a redesign of a section, ask for the paid pages to be tested straight afterwards, and ask what they tested. This is simply part of what a maintenance team should be doing between your ad changes, and the arrangement works best when it is written down rather than assumed.
Time zones add a small wrinkle. If your campaigns run in the evening in your country and the maintenance team is hours ahead, a change made at the end of their day lands in the middle of your peak. Agree a rule that nothing touching an ad landing page goes live on your busiest days without a heads-up, and that the form is tested immediately afterwards.
What Google looks at on the page
Google Ads includes a landing page experience rating as part of how it judges ad quality, and it can affect how your ads perform in the auction. Google’s own descriptions of this are broad rather than a checklist, so treat anything claiming to know the exact formula with caution. What is safe to say is that a page that loads reliably, matches what the ad promised, is clear about who you are and works on a phone is a better bet than one that does not. Those happen to be the same things a customer wants.
Paid clicks are only one way people find a site. How maintenance relates to organic search is a different question, covered in what website maintenance does and does not do for SEO.
Separately, ads can be disapproved when the destination does not work or does not match the ad. If you ever see a disapproval for a page problem, the fix is usually on the website rather than in the account.
Ecommerce pages need an extra pass
If the ad sends people to a product or category page, add three checks: the product is still in stock and the price on the page matches the ad, the add-to-cart button works, and the checkout completes, including the payment step. A store that is mid-sale needs the checkout tested more often than monthly. The routine in the ecommerce maintenance routine for UK and US stores covers that side in more depth.
What to write down every month
Keep the log of your landing page review short, or you will stop keeping it. For each page, a line is enough:
- Date checked and device used.
- Load: fine, slow, or redirected.
- Form or call: tested and arrived, or tested and failed.
- Tracking: the conversion appeared, or did not.
- What you reported, to whom, and when it was fixed.
After a few months the log earns its keep: if leads drop, you can see whether the page was healthy that week, which narrows the question to the ads, the season or the market.
A shorter version for a busy month
If you have ten minutes and one page, the compact form of monthly landing page checks for Google Ads is this: open it in a private window on your phone, submit the form, tap the phone number, and confirm the email arrived. Four actions. That small test catches most of the failures that cost real money.
Mistakes worth avoiding
- Sending every ad to the home page. Visitors then have to find what they came for. A page built for one offer is easier to check, too.
- Testing only from the office. Your network, your cookies and your saved form data all flatter the page.
- Changing the page and the ad on the same day. If results move, you will not know which change did it.
- Treating ad platform numbers and site analytics as identical. They will differ somewhat, so compare trends month to month rather than expecting exact matches.
One last note
None of this requires technical skill, and you can do it without hiring anyone. If you would rather have a second pair of eyes on the pages that carry your paid traffic, you could begin with the free site health review, which states plainly what it can and cannot see from outside.
