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Is Your Data Lying to You?
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Here's a scenario that happens way more than you'd think.
A business owner looks at their Google Ads dashboard and sees:
β’ $900/week in ad spend
β’ 3 conversions
β’ $300 cost per conversion
Their gut reaction? "Google Ads doesn't work for my business."
They're about to pause everything and lose whatever momentum they'd built. Can you blame them? $300 per lead sounds terrible.
But here's the thing in this case, the ads aren't broken. The tracking is.
WHAT BROKEN TRACKING LOOKS LIKE
We recently looked at an account with exactly these numbers. On the surface, it's ugly. $300+ per lead for a service-based business is not sustainable.
But when we dug in, the red flags weren't in the campaigns. They were in the conversion setup:
β Phone call tracking wasn't firing on the mobile click-to-call button
β Form submissions were being tracked on the "thank you" page, but the page loaded intermittently
β No offline conversion import- Google had no idea which clicks actually led to paying customers
β The Google Ads conversion tag and Google Analytics goals were double-counting some conversions and missing others
So those "3 conversions" the dashboard showed? That was probably 3 out of 15-20 actual leads that came in that week. The rest simply weren't being recorded.
WHY THIS IS SO DANGEROUS
When your conversion tracking is broken, two bad things happen:
1. YOU make bad decisions. You see $300/lead and think "this isn't working." You cut budget or pause campaigns that were actually performing.
2. GOOGLE makes bad decisions. Smart Bidding optimizes toward conversions. If it only sees 3 conversions a week, it can't learn who your ideal customer is. It needs 15-30 conversions/month minimum to optimize well. Broken tracking starves the algorithm.
You end up in a death spiral: bad data β bad optimization β worse results β you pull the plug.
THE FIX
Here's the checklist we run on every new account:
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Google Ads conversion tag β firing on ALL conversion actions (calls, forms, chats)
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Phone call tracking β using a third-party tool like CallRail, not just Google forwarding numbers
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Form tracking β event-based (not pageview-based) to avoid intermittent page load issues
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Google Analytics 4 β properly linked to Google Ads, importing conversions correctly
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Offline conversion import β feeding back real revenue/deal data to Google (for businesses with a sales cycle)
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Consent Mode V2 β required for EU audiences, increasingly important everywhere
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Enhanced conversions β sharing hashed first-party data to improve match rates
If even one of these is off, your data is lying to you.
THE LESSON
Before you decide "Google Ads doesn't work for my business." Check your tracking first.
I've seen accounts go from "$300 per lead" to "$40 per lead" with zero changes to the actual campaigns. Just by fixing what gets counted.
TOOL OF THE WEEK
Keeping track of all your tracking fixes (ironic, right?) is half the battle. I use Monday.com to manage every client account: tasks, audits, timelines, everything. If you're running a business and still managing things in spreadsheets, give it a try.
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Monday.com
Your one-stop shop for everything project management.
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