Home / Conversion tracking
Google Ads conversion tracking, down to jobs won.
Google spends your budget towards whatever your account counts as a conversion — and both of the accounts on our results page arrived counting it wrong. Broken tracking is the most common expensive fault the audit finds. We rebuild the counting: calls, forms, and the jobs won in your books imported back, so bidding chases revenue instead of noise.
Tracking rebuilt as part of management from £950/month · no contracts past month three
No call required · read-only access · in writing within 48 hours
Broken tracking means bidding blind
Smart Bidding does one thing: it moves your money towards whatever the account records as a conversion. When the recording is wrong, every bid that follows is wrong too — automatically, around the clock, at your expense.
The uncomfortable part is that a broken count rarely looks broken. The report still fills with numbers, the graphs still move, and Google still optimises — towards phantom leads, duplicated forms, or only the half of your enquiries it can actually see. Three faults come up more than all the others:
The dead tag. A site update killed it months ago. Conversions read zero, so bidding drifts back to guesswork while the leads that do arrive go uncredited.
The double count. The form tag fires on page view as well as submit. Cost per lead looks brilliant; the diary says otherwise, and budget follows the wrong keywords.
The invisible phone. Calls were never wired in. Mobile looks like the losing device while it quietly fills your diary, so money drifts to the desktop clicks Google can see.
Both featured accounts arrived exactly like this. The vehicle remapping specialist came from a previous agency paying £32 a lead; the specialist automotive network was paying £86. In each case the first job was not clever bidding — it was rebuilding the counting, because you cannot lower the cost of a lead while the account cannot agree what one is. They now run at £14.77 and £20.17 (live account data, 14 and 30 days, anonymised).
What proper tracking means
Four standards, wired and then tested from a real phone before we let bidding automate anything. If your account cannot pass all four, that is the first fix — ahead of keywords, ads or budgets.
Calls counted, at 60 seconds or moreCalls from ads and calls from the website are both tracked, and only conversations of a minute or longer count. A misdial, a wrong number or a supplier is not a lead, and it should not teach your bidding anything.
Forms that fire onceOne enquiry, one conversion — tested by submitting the form from a real phone, not assumed from a green light in the interface. Form tags are the ones that die most often when a website changes, so they get checked again after every change.
Jobs won, imported from your booksOffline conversion tracking: each month, the enquiries that became booked work go back into Google Ads with their value attached, matched to the click that started them. A spreadsheet is enough to run it; a CRM makes it automatic.
A read-out you can trustWhen the account reports a number, it matches your diary and your inbox. Every decision after that — ours or Google’s — is built on something true.
Tracking is rebuilt and maintained as part of management, from £950/month with no contracts past month three. Maintained matters as much as rebuilt: tags mostly die on the day a website changes, which is why they are re-tested then.
Then bidding can chase revenue, not cheap enquiries
Value-based bidding, in owner’s terms: stop asking Google for conversions at the lowest cost, and start handing it the numbers from your books.
Most accounts give Google a single instruction — get me conversions cheaply. Google obliges, and cheap enquiries are exactly what arrives, because a £90 service enquiry and a £3,000 contract weigh the same in the count. The budget drifts towards whichever keywords produce the cheapest something, which is rarely the keywords that produce the work you want. The fix is closing the loop, so the account can see the whole journey:
They search, they click, you pay.Google sees this perfectly. It invoices you for it.
A call over 60 seconds, or a form that fired once.Where most accounts stop counting — when the tag works at all.
You price the job and send it.Invisible to Google. Nothing in the account knows this happened.
The work lands in your books with a value against it.We import this back into the account, matched to the click that started it. This is the number bidding should chase.
Once that last row flows back in, the instruction changes from cheapest enquiries to most revenue. Bidding starts favouring the searches, areas, hours and devices that end in booked work — including the expensive clicks that earn their price — and easing off the cheap ones that never turn into a job. That is the whole of value-based bidding: the account stops buying enquiries and starts buying work. The steel fabrication firm on our results page is run on exactly that basis — the number we manage to is work booked through the account, £120k a month of it (client-reported), not a count of enquiries.
What clean numbers turn into
Tracking is not housekeeping. It is where these numbers start — both of the takeover accounts below arrived with theirs broken.
Cost per lead for a vehicle remapping specialist, taken over from a previous agency with broken tracking. Counting rebuilt first; 16.44% conversion rate.
Live account data, 14 days, anonymisedCost per lead across a specialist automotive network. 468 leads in 30 days, counted on rebuilt tracking.
Live account data, 30 days, anonymisedWork booked through the account for a steel fabrication firm — managed on booked work, not enquiry counts.
Client-reportedThe wider book runs on the same standard. Across all three desks we run £191K of client spend and 10.6K conversions in an average month, at £17.95 per conversion and a 16–17% conversion rate — every conversion counted the way this page describes. For scale, LocaliQ’s 2026 cross-industry search averages sit near $66.69 per lead (about £50) at an 8.18% conversion rate.
Find out what your account is really counting
Tracking accuracy is one of the twelve checks in the audit: whether your conversion numbers are real enquiries, duplicates, or a tag that stopped firing months ago. Read-only access is enough. If the counting is broken, you will have it in writing, with a cost against it, within 48 hours.
Conversion tracking questions
How do I know if my Google Ads conversion tracking is broken?
The common signs: the report shows conversions your diary cannot match; counts that jump, double or fall to zero on a date you can trace to a website change; or conversions recorded at hours when nobody could have enquired. Tracking accuracy is one of the twelve checks in the free audit — read-only access is enough to confirm it either way, in writing, within 48 hours.
What is offline conversion tracking?
It means telling Google Ads what happened after the click left the website. When an enquiry becomes a quoted and then a booked job, that outcome and its value are imported back into the account, matched to the click that started it. From then on the account learns from work you actually won, not from enquiries alone.
What is value-based bidding, and does my account need it?
Standard bidding chases conversions at the lowest cost, which treats a £90 enquiry and a £3,000 contract as equals; value-based bidding hands Google the revenue numbers instead, so it favours the searches that end in booked work. It needs accurate tracking underneath it and enough conversion data to learn from. On smaller budgets we usually start with clean counting and a cost-per-lead target, and move to value rules once the data supports them.
Why do you only count phone calls of 60 seconds or more?
Because a misdial is not a lead. Sixty seconds filters out wrong numbers, instant hang-ups and suppliers, and leaves what you would actually call a lead if you were standing next to the phone: a conversation. Some accounts count every call however short, which flatters the report and misleads the bidding.
Do I need a CRM to import jobs won?
No. A spreadsheet updated once a month is enough — which enquiries became jobs, and what each one was worth. A CRM makes the same loop automatic, but not having one is no reason to keep bidding on enquiries alone.
Can you check my tracking without taking over the account?
Yes. The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit checks tracking accuracy through read-only access, and the findings are yours in writing either way — take them to your current agency or fix them in-house if you prefer. Rebuilding and maintaining the tracking ourselves is part of management, from £950/month with no contracts past month three.
If the numbers are wrong, everything downstream is wrong
The 12-Point Wasted-Spend Audit checks what your account is really counting — findings in writing within 48 hours, yours either way.
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