Why Your Google Ads Conversions Might Not Be Telling You Anything

If you’ve been running Google Ads for any length of time, you’ll know how important it is to see what your spending is actually producing. Whether it’s your own money going out each month, or you’re a marketing manager who has to report progress to a director, a board or a sales team, you need to be able to say what the spend is doing.

And in the world of Google Ads, that can be easier said than done.

I’ve been working with Google Ads since 2005, and visibility into the inner workings has come a long way since then. There are far more ways to track what happens after someone clicks an ad than there used to be. But the platform has also become more complex and more automated, and that has made it easier for tracking to look as though it’s working when it isn’t.

So, it’s no surprise that I often see accounts where money is being spent, and conversion numbers are ticking up, but there’s still no clear answer about what those numbers actually mean for the business.

This is a big topic, and I can’t cover everything here. Instead, this is the first of two posts on the issues I come across most often. This one looks at the account itself: four ways your conversion tracking can fail to tell you anything useful, starting with the most obvious.

1. Nothing is being tracked at all

It sounds unlikely, but I’ve seen plenty of accounts with no conversion tracking set up at all.

Running Google Ads without conversion tracking is a bit like driving with your eyes closed. You can see clicks, impressions, and costs, but you’re left guessing which clicks actually turned into leads. It’s not just you missing out; Google’s bidding system is also flying blind, with no data to help it figure out which searches, ads, or audiences are worth investing in.

If you want to get real results and understand what’s working in today’s paid advertising world, some form of conversion tracking isn’t just helpful: it’s essential!

One example that comes to mind is a telephone answering service client looking for new customer leads. Their marketing manager had been running their Google Ads for a year. They felt the business had won more customers since the ads started, and the campaigns were hitting their daily budget most days. The business owners were asking whether they should increase their spend, but without conversion tracking, there was no way to show that the new customers were coming from Google Ads. The marketing manager was asked to prove the relationship between spend and results but didn’t have the data.

So, I set up conversion tracking for the two actions that mattered most to them: phone calls lasting at least three minutes and completed callback request forms. Once the data started coming through, the business could clearly see what the spend was producing. I made other optimisations first, but with that visibility in place, they felt confident increasing their budget, and they based the decision on evidence rather than a hunch.

There are a few well-trodden routes to getting it in place:

• Contact Google Ads support or your Google rep (if you have one), who can connect you with the right team.

• Bring in your web developer, which is often needed anyway depending on what you want to track and how your site is built.
• Work with a Google Ads specialist who can also work with your web developer (if needed) to set it up and check it properly.

There’s also a decision to make about how the tracking is added: placing the code directly on your website or using Google Tag Manager. Tag Manager is my preferred method. It keeps your tracking in one place, means changes don’t require editing your website’s code each time, and makes it much easier to check that everything is firing correctly.

2. Something is tracked, but it isn’t a lead

The next most common issue is that conversion tracking exists, but what it’s counting isn’t a lead.

A common example is setting a page view, like the Contact Us or About Us page, as a conversion. I’ve seen this plenty of times. While it’s better than nothing, and sometimes there’s a good reason for it, these days you can usually track form submissions and phone calls easily, which gives you much clearer data.

The problem is that a page view tells you someone landed on a page, not that they got in touch. They might have visited your contact page, glanced at it and left. They might have read your About page out of curiosity. Or they might have been the wrong person entirely: if your campaigns are attracting the wrong searches, and those people still reach the page, it’s still counted as a conversion.

Then automated bidding makes it worse. Say you’re using Maximise Conversions or Target CPA, Google takes your conversions at face value. To the system, it’s doing brilliantly and should go find more of those page views. So, it steers your budget towards people who are likely to look at a page, not people who are likely to become customers.

Your account might look busy, with conversions going up and cost per conversion looking good. But none of that tells you if real leads are coming in. All the while, the bidding is quietly optimising for the wrong goal.

3. Real leads are tracked, but they’re all counted the same

This is where an account starts to look like it’s in good shape. You’re tracking genuine leads, say phone calls and contact form submissions, and each one counts as a conversion. Job done?

Not quite, because leads aren’t all worth the same.

In conversations with one sales team at a niche SaaS company I worked with, phone call leads turned into qualified opportunities (MQL’s) around 50% of the time, whereas leads from the contact form converted around 10% of the time. The numbers will be different for every business, but a gap like this is common. For this particular business, someone who picked up the phone was often further along in the buyer journey than someone who filled in a form.

If both count as one conversion with the same value, the account can’t see that difference, and neither can you. Twenty form fills may look like a better month than eight phone calls. But using those rates, the eight calls would produce around four qualified opportunities and the twenty forms around two.

This is where value-based bidding comes in. You give each type of lead a value that reflects what it’s typically worth to the business: a higher value for a phone call, a lower value for a form fill. Then you switch the bidding strategy to Maximise Conversion Value, so the system is pushing towards the more valuable leads. You still want the form leads, but the account now leans towards bringing in more calls.

It also gives you much better visibility. Your reporting starts to show which campaigns, keywords, and ads are bringing in the most valuable leads, which helps you make smarter decisions. That might mean adding call assets, tweaking your ad schedule so ads show when the phones are staffed, or even restructuring a campaign.

Don’t worry about getting the values perfect; the difference between them matters more than the exact numbers. A good starting point is to take the average value of a new customer and multiply it by the rough conversion rate for each lead type.

For example, if a new customer is worth £10,000 to you:

• If around 1 in 10 phone call leads becomes a customer, each call is worth roughly £1,000
• If around 1 in 50 form leads become a customer, each form fill is worth roughly £200

One thing to keep in mind: value-based bidding works best when you have a decent amount of conversion data for the system to learn from. If your account is smaller or doesn’t get many conversions, it’s still worth applying values for clearer reporting.

While you’re looking at your lead actions, there are two settings worth checking too.

The first is the count setting. For leads, this should usually be set to “One”, so that if someone clicks your ad and fills in your form twice, it counts as one lead, not two. If it’s set to “Every”, your lead numbers can look higher than they really are.

The second is call length. By default, Google Ads counts a call as a conversion after 60 seconds. That can include existing customers, suppliers, wrong numbers and sales calls, all counted as leads. Depending on your business, a longer minimum call length can give you a more accurate picture.

But remember, if you have been running your campaigns for a while on the default 60-second call conversion and you change it to say 180 (3 mins), be prepared to see your conversion numbers drop at first, but over time your quality should improve, and quantity should increase as you're giving the system better information about what constitutes a meaningful call.

In part two, I’ll go further into this with lead scoring, which looks at what happens to leads after they arrive.

4. Everything is set to primary

Google Ads lets you set each conversion action as primary or secondary. Primary actions count in your main Conversions column and, in most setups, are used by the bidding system. Secondary actions are still recorded, so you can see them, but they don’t steer the bidding. (Campaigns can also be set to optimise for their own specific goals rather than the account defaults, so it’s worth checking which goals each campaign is using.)

Used well, secondary actions are useful. Say you’re running Google Ads to get people to complete an online quiz, where people answer a few questions and then enter their details to receive a free benchmark report. The lead is the person completing the quiz and requesting the report, so that’s your primary conversion.

But you might also want to track the step before it: someone pressing the start button. You don’t want that to steer the bidding, because starting a quiz isn’t a lead. You do want to know how many people are doing it, though. Set it as secondary, and you’ve got a simple funnel to look at.

If 100 people from your ads start the quiz and 20 complete it and request the report, you can see that. If 100 start and only two finish, you know something isn’t working, and you can start investigating. It might be the length of the quiz, the questions, the form at the end, or the people the ads are bringing in.

The problem comes when that distinction isn’t used, and I’ve seen countless accounts where everything is set to primary. Alongside the real lead actions, you’ll often find things like:

• Clicks for directions to the business address
• Clicks on an email link
• Brochure or PDF downloads
• Newsletter sign-ups
• Engagement events imported from GA4, such as scrolls or engaged sessions
• Conversion actions created automatically when accounts were linked, which nobody remembers setting up

Each of these counts as a full conversion, the same as a phone call or a form submission.

Take directions clicks. If you’re an office that gets a lot of visits, people asking for directions might be perfectly normal. But a directions click is much easier for the system to get than a phone call or a completed form. When an easy action and a harder action both count equally, there’s a risk the bidding leans towards the easy one. The system has come a long way, and it won’t always happen, but the risk is there.

Reporting gets muddled too. Ten conversions in a month could mean two real leads and eight direction clicks, but the headline number alone won’t tell you that.

Watch out for double counting as well. The same form fill can be tracked twice, for example once through the Google Ads tag and again through a GA4 import, with both set to primary. One lead becomes two conversions, and the numbers look twice as good as they really are.

The answer isn’t to delete these actions: many are still useful to track. Just set them as secondary, and reserve primary for the actions that represent a real lead.

Here’s a quick check you can do yourself: in Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary, and look at which actions are set to primary. For each one, ask yourself: if this doubled next month, would the business be better off? If the answer is “not really”, it probably shouldn’t be primary.

What these four have in common

Each of these gives you numbers in some form, but none reliably tells you what your spend is actually producing.

Because the bidding system learns from your conversion data, a tracking problem quickly becomes a budget-spend problem. Fixing these won’t guarantee better results on its own, but it gives the account, and you, a far more honest picture to make decisions from.

A quick conversion tracking check

If you’re not sure where your account stands, these four questions are a good place to start:

• Is conversion tracking set up at all?
• Are your conversions genuine leads, rather than page views?
• Do different types of leads have values that reflect what they’re worth?
• Are only your genuine lead actions set to primary?

If the answer to any of these is no, or you’re not sure, that’s where I’d look first.

Coming up in part two

Getting your tracking right inside Google Ads is only half the story. I see plenty of accounts with a tidy setup that still can’t tell what’s working, because the real issue lies outside Google Ads.

In part two, I’ll dig into the three issues I see most often: when the customer journey breaks as one system hands over to another, when there’s no feedback from the CRM about which leads became customers, and when outcomes happen so far down the line that the account can’t learn from them without more helpful data.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your conversion setup, a Google Ads Power Hour is a great way to get started. Or if you’d like someone to help get your tracking and account running smoothly and manage it for you, feel free to book a discovery call.

A note on how this post is written

In the spirit of transparency, I use AI tools, including Claude, Grammarly, and others, to help turn my own thinking, experience, and dictated notes into finished writing. The ideas, opinions, and experiences in this post are mine. AI helps with structure and editing, turning what's in my head into something readable and, I hope, useful for thinking about your own Google Ads campaigns.