I cannot seem to get my campaigns to consistently produce leads

Hello I am managing my fathers google ads to try and get more architecture clients from phone calls or website lead form submissions. The first set of ads we ran were performance max ads that got the job done and brought us leads and phone calls. But over time they slowed and started giving us no leads at all. So we switched to a search campaign with keywords we believed relevant to our business and ran them. This produced almost no leads for us and generally gave us less impressions and clicks so we paused and went back to pmax. We have gave each campaign a month to produce results. After returning to the pmax we let it sit for another month but received almost no leads. The impressions were back to from before but we were getting way less leads. So then I set up an appointment with some google representative who is apparently assigned to me and he gave me some recommendations to try on my search campaign like using the keyword planner and not using too many keywords so I followed and used 15 exact phrase keywords. My results were horrible I was getting absolutely no clicks or impressions so I added some phrase match keywords that were copies of the exact ones and it has produced very little impressions and clicks and 0 leads. What do I do? I feel trapped in mediocre results and don’t know what to do. Is it my budget of 25 dollars a day? My keywords? I don’t know what is causing my horrible performance. No matter what keywords I choose they say they’re elligible but low quality and when I hold my mouse over them it says for every single keyword that my ads aren’t showing and when I click ad preview and diagnoses it just says they aren’t showing and nothing about how to fix it. I have spent 203 dollars in the last 2 weeks for nothing it feels like. Should I change my bidding strategy of maximize conversions that it put automatically? Adjust the budget? I’m lost please help me.

Specifically what conversions are you tracking? Just the call? Closing the deal? Multiple pipeline steps?

FOR this type of project it's better to use bing ads

You can try testing your targeting and landing page because small changes in these can make a big difference in lead flow.

first thing i’d figure out is whether it’s actually inconsistent or just low volume. with 20 or so leads a month, a good month and a bad month can happen without much really changing. if volume is healthy, i’d check impressions, ctr, landing page conversion and lead quality in that order, and make sure tracking is actually working before changing anything.

performance max also works using your existing data, so make sure your conversions are being recorded properly. check your landing page. you may have left the p.max final url option enabled. if you allowed some automations on the ads side, there may be issues with negative keywords.

make sure to check your change history and see what changes were made the day before or on the same day the drop started.

if you set a target cpa, change it back to the previous setting.

You can try checking your targeting and landing page first because small changes in the offer or audience can make a big difference in lead quality.

Consistency is hard. Are you testing new creatives regularly or running the same ones?