Is Google Ads Counting the Wrong Thing? How to Fix Your Conversion Tracking
Picture a plumber in Hamilton who spends $1,500 a month on Google Ads. The report says 140 conversions. Nice number. But the phone has barely rung, and when he looks closer, most of those "conversions" are people who landed on the thank-you page by refreshing it, or who clicked the Contact link in the footer.
Google isn't lying to him. It's counting exactly what he told it to count. The problem is that he told it the wrong thing.
Google learns from whatever you call a win
When you set up Smart Bidding (the setting where Google adjusts what you pay for each click), it studies your past wins and goes looking for more people like them. What it treats as a win is a "conversion". You decide what that is.
So if a page view counts as a win, Google gets very good at finding people who view pages. If a real phone enquiry counts, it gets good at finding people who ring. The same budget can give you very different results depending on this one choice.
Most accounts we look at have one of three problems:
Too much counted. Every click on a button or every page visit is marked as a conversion, so the numbers look great and mean nothing.
Too little counted. Only the contact form is tracked, but half the customers phone straight from the ad or from the website.
Everything counted equally. A tyre-kicker asking about a free sample and a customer who books a $4,000 job each count as one.
What to count
Start with the actions that make your phone ring or your inbox fill. For most small businesses that's a short list:
Form submissions. Count the thank-you page that only appears after a form is sent, not the contact page itself.
Calls from your ads. Google can put a forwarding number on the ad itself and record how long each call lasted. You can then say that only calls over, say, 60 seconds count, which cuts out wrong numbers and accidental taps.
Calls from your website. Google can swap the number on your site for a tracking one when someone arrives from an ad. Tap-to-call buttons on mobile can be counted too.
Bookings or purchases, if you take them online.
Then tell Google which of these are the ones to chase. In Google Ads you can mark each action as "primary" (used to decide who to target and how much to bid) or "secondary" (shown in reports only). Things like a newsletter sign-up or a PDF download usually belong in secondary. Otherwise Google will happily chase cheap downloads while the real enquiries dry up.
Test it yourself before you trust it
This takes five minutes and catches most problems. Open your own ad on your phone (use a private tab so you don't pay for the click), fill in the form with a fake enquiry, and ring the number. Then check Google Ads a few hours later, since conversions can take time to appear.
If the form shows up but the call doesn't, or the form counts twice, or nothing shows at all, you've found the problem. Fix it before spending another dollar. Bidding on bad data costs more than bidding on no data.
One tip: use Google's own Tag Assistant tool or the "Diagnostics" tab on your conversion actions. They'll flag a tag that isn't firing.
The step most businesses skip: tell Google which leads became jobs
Here's where it gets interesting. A form fill isn't a customer. Some enquiries are great and some go nowhere. Google can't tell the difference unless you tell it.
That's what offline conversion imports do. When an enquiry turns into a paid job, you send that back to Google, and it links the sale to the original ad click. Over time Google learns which clicks lead to real work and goes looking for more of them, not just more form fills.
A few facts worth knowing, from Google's own help pages:
The sale has to happen within 90 days of the click for the standard method to work. If you send back the customer's email or phone (Google calls this enhanced conversions for leads), the window is 63 days.
Upload on a regular schedule, ideally daily or every few days, not once in a blue moon.
Add a dollar value to each conversion if you can, so Google knows a $4,000 job matters more than a $200 one.
Give it time. Google suggests running it for a full sales cycle or two before relying on it for bidding.
You don't need fancy software. A lot of small businesses start with a simple spreadsheet: every Friday, note which enquiries became jobs and upload that list. If your customer system connects to Google Ads, it can do it for you.
Also worth turning on: enhanced conversions. When someone fills in a form, it sends a scrambled version of their email to Google so it can match the sale to the ad even if the browser blocked tracking cookies. One agency's write-up puts the extra conversions recovered at 5 to 15 percent, though that varies by business.
Where to start
If you only do one thing this week, check what's marked as a conversion in your account right now. Go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. If you see page views, scrolls or "click to contact" actions sitting there as primary, that's your first fix.
If you haven't built the account yet, or you want to see where tracking sits alongside budgets and campaign types, we cover the whole setup in the full guide we wrote on running Google and Meta ads. This post is about getting the numbers right once the ads are going.
