OPTIMIZED

Your Google Ads setup is actually structured better than most businesses we see. The fundamentals are in place — your tracking is working, your budget is focused, and you gave your campaigns enough time to learn.
If your results still feel inconsistent, the problem is likely not your setup. It's either competitors bidding aggressively on the same keywords, your pricing or offer versus the market, or a budget ceiling limiting how much data Google can collect each month.
The good news is these are solvable — but they need a different approach than fixing a broken foundation. This is where most owners plateau and assume Google Ads just stops working at a certain point. It doesn't. It just needs a different strategy at this stage.

NEEDS WORK

Your instincts are right — something is off. And based on your answers, you're not imagining it.
You have some of the right pieces in place, but there are specific gaps in your setup that are costing you money every single month. The frustrating part is these gaps are invisible — your ads are running, clicks are coming in, but the foundation has holes that prevent Google from finding your actual buyers.
This is not a budget problem. Spending more right now would make the leaking worse, not better. The fix is identifying exactly which gaps are bleeding your budget and closing them before scaling anything.
The businesses that break through from this stage are the ones that stop adding spend and start fixing structure first.

BLEEDING BUDGET

Your answers point to multiple structural problems running at the same time.
This is the most common situation we see with Philippine businesses running their own ads — and it's also the most misunderstood. It feels like Google Ads isn't working. What's actually happening is Google is working exactly as instructed — but the instructions it's been given are wrong.
When conversion tracking is incomplete, when automated bidding starts too early, when campaigns get paused and restarted — Google doesn't just underperform. It actively optimizes toward the wrong goal using the wrong signals. Every peso you spend in this state is teaching Google to find the wrong people.
More budget won't fix this. A longer waiting period won't fix this. Only correcting the structure fixes this — and until that happens, the bleeding continues quietly every day.

CRITICAL

Based on your answers, your Google Ads account is not set up to succeed right now — and that is not your fault.
Nobody teaches business owners these things before they start spending. The platforms make it easy to launch a campaign and nearly impossible to know whether it's set up correctly. So you spend, you wait, nothing happens, and you conclude that Google Ads doesn't work for your business.
It does work. But right now your account is optimizing toward the wrong goal, spending on the wrong searches, and Google has no reliable data to learn from. Every day it runs in this state it's collecting the wrong information — which means the longer it runs without being fixed, the harder the recovery.
The foundation needs to be rebuilt before a single additional peso goes into it. Not tweaked. Rebuilt.