When I look at a Google Ads account for the first time, I do not start with the ads or the keywords. I start with the conversions column. That one number tells me whether the whole account is being run on real information or on guesswork, and more often than I would like, it turns out to be guesswork.
The reason is simple. Google Ads conversion tracking is the least glamorous part of an account, so it is the part most people skip over or set up in a hurry. And once it is wrong, everything built on top of it is wrong too. You can have brilliant ads pointing at a great website, but if the account is counting the wrong thing, you will still end up spending money in the wrong places.
What conversion tracking actually is
Google can see two things on its own: how many people clicked your ad, and how much that cost you. What it cannot see, unless you tell it, is what happened next. Did the person ring you? Fill in the form? Book something? Or did they glance at the page and leave?
Conversion tracking is the bit of setup that closes that gap. It sends a signal back to Google that says "this click led to an enquiry." Without it, Google is working blind, and so are you. You are looking at clicks and cost and quietly hoping the good stuff is happening somewhere off screen.
Clicks are not customers
Plenty of business owners judge their ads on clicks and impressions, because those are the numbers Google puts front and centre. The trouble is that a click is just someone arriving. It tells you nothing about whether they became a customer.
I have seen accounts that look wonderfully busy, thousands of impressions, a healthy click-through rate, and an owner who cannot work out why the phone is not ringing any more than it used to. The clicks were real. They were just not turning into anything, and nobody was measuring the part that mattered.
The three ways it usually goes wrong
The first and most common problem is that conversion tracking simply is not there. The account was set up to get ads live quickly, tracking was left for "later", and later never came.
The second is more slippery: the account is tracking something, but it is tracking the wrong action. This is the one that catches people out. I have seen accounts counting visits to the contact page as conversions, when reaching a page is not the same as sending the form on it. I have seen every click on a phone number counted, including on desktop, where almost nobody actually rings. One account I looked at was proudly reporting forty conversions a month, and when we traced them back, most were people opening a PDF price list. Useful to know, but not an enquiry, and certainly not something to bid harder to get more of.
The third is the opposite problem: it counts too much. Spam form submissions, accidental double clicks, the same person counted three times. The number looks great in the report and means very little.
Why the wrong setting quietly drains your budget
Here is the part that turns a reporting nuisance into a real cost. Most accounts now use some form of automated bidding, where you hand Google a target and it decides what to bid for each auction. Those systems optimise towards whatever you have told them a conversion is.
So if your conversion is "reached the contact page", Google will confidently go and find you more people who reach the contact page and leave. It is doing exactly what you asked. The problem is you asked for the wrong thing. Bad tracking does not just mislead you after the fact, it actively steers your spend in the wrong direction, day after day. This is very often the hidden reason behind ads that get clicks but no enquiries.
The phone calls almost everyone misses
For most local service businesses, the majority of enquiries still come by phone, not through a form. Yet a lot of accounts only track form submissions. If that is you, you are blind to most of the work your ads are actually generating.
Proper Google Ads conversion tracking should cover calls as well as forms: calls made straight from the ad, and calls to the number on your website after someone clicks through. You can even set a minimum call length, say sixty seconds, so a genuine conversation counts and a ten-second wrong number does not. Get this in place and campaigns that looked like they were losing money often turn out to have been paying their way all along.
How to check your own account, without being technical
You do not need to understand the code to sanity-check this. Open the account and look at the conversions column, then ask a plain question about each conversion action listed: what real thing does this represent? If you cannot say confidently that it means "someone actually got in touch", that is your answer.
Then test it. Fill in your own contact form, or ring your own tracked number, and check whether it shows up a few hours later. It sounds obvious, but I would guess a fair share of accounts have never once been tested this way.
While you are in there, look at which conversion actions are marked as "primary". Those are the ones your bidding is chasing. Make sure they are your genuine enquiries and nothing else. If you spot anything called a "page view" or "website visit" that Google created automatically, be very wary of it feeding your bidding.
Get it counting real enquiries first
Once your tracking reflects actual enquiries, everything else about running the account gets easier and more honest. You can finally see what an enquiry really costs you, judge your return on ad spend on solid ground, and tell which keywords earn their place and which quietly waste money. The automated bidding starts working for you instead of against you, because it is finally aiming at the right target. It is also the foundation for knowing whether your marketing is working at all.
None of this is exciting. It is plumbing. But it is the difference between Google Ads you can trust and a monthly bill you are half hoping is doing something.
If you are not certain what your conversions are actually counting, that is one of the first things we check in a free Google Ads audit. No account access needed, and no obligation, just a straight answer on whether your budget is being measured properly. Get in touch and I will take a look.