Is your conversion tracking lying to you? 6 signs your Google Ads numbers can't be trusted
Every bidding decision, budget change and report depends on conversion tracking. Here are six common ways it goes wrong, and how to spot each one.
If you only check one thing in your Google Ads account this month, check conversion tracking. Smart bidding learns from it, every "cost per lead" comes from it, and every decision to pause, cut or spend more depends on it. When tracking is wrong, good campaigns get cut and bad ones get more money.
The tricky part is that broken tracking rarely looks broken. Numbers still appear. They're just wrong. Here are the six patterns we see most often.
1. Conversions stopped, clicks didn't
A website update removes the tag, a form plugin changes its thank-you page, or call forwarding stops working. Clicks keep coming, conversions drop to zero, and it looks like the ads stopped working.
How to spot it: look at conversions by day. Several days in a row with normal clicks and zero conversions, when the account normally gets a few a day, is almost always tracking, not the ads.
One caution: if your leads are reported days after the click (call-backs logged later, jobs uploaded from a CRM once a week), the last few days always look empty at first. Compare with how long your leads usually take to arrive before calling it broken.
2. Page views or clicks counted as leads
Some accounts count "visited the contact page" or "clicked the phone number" as a conversion. Those are interest, not leads.
How to spot it: in Goals → Conversions, check which actions are primary. Anything that isn't a real enquiry should be secondary.
3. Very short calls counted as leads
Calls from ads count as conversions once they pass a minimum length. If that's set to a few seconds, every wrong number and hang-up becomes a "lead".
How to spot it: check the call length setting on your call conversion actions. 60 seconds is a sensible default for most service businesses.
4. The same lead counted twice
A form tracked by both the Google tag and an imported Analytics goal, or a conversion action set to count every conversion instead of one per click, can double your numbers.
How to spot it: compare the leads Google reports with the leads you actually received over a couple of weeks. If Google shows about twice as many, look for duplicate actions, and set lead actions to count "one" per click.
5. Spikes without more clicks
A day with five times the usual conversions but normal clicks usually means spam form fills, a bot, or a tag firing on page reload.
How to spot it: scan conversions by day for sudden spikes and check whether clicks rose too.
6. Ad groups that convert half their clicks
Real lead rates for service businesses are usually somewhere around 5 to 25 percent of clicks. An ad group converting more than half its clicks is almost always counting something other than leads.
How to spot it: sort ad groups by conversion rate. Anything above 50 percent deserves a look at which conversion action is recording it.
Why this matters more than any other fix
Inflated conversions are especially expensive, because they make campaigns look cheaper than they are. That's exactly when it's tempting to raise budgets and bids, and that's when the money is wasted. Undercounted conversions do the opposite: good ad groups look like losers and get paused.
So the order is always the same: check tracking first, then judge the campaigns. PPC Master does this on every sync. When leads stop recording it shows a warning on every page and holds back anything that depends on conversion numbers. When conversions look inflated, it stops suggesting you spend more until that's fixed. You can see what it finds in your account for free.