When I audit a Google Ads account, I look at how it decides what counts as a sale before I look at a single ad.
Most of the time, something in there is wrong. Sometimes it’s a small gap. Sometimes the whole account has been steering by numbers that have very little to do with what actually happened in the business.
If that’s you, please don’t beat yourself up about it. Tracking is set up once, usually by whoever built the account, and then nobody looks at it again for years. It’s nobody’s job, so it drifts.
Why broken tracking costs you more than you think
Conversion tracking is the bit of Google Ads that records what happens after somebody clicks. A sale, an enquiry form, a phone call. In plain English, it’s how the account knows which ads made you money.
Everything else in the account is built on top of it. The reports you’re sent, the decisions about where the budget goes, and these days most of the bidding too, because Google’s automated bidding learns from whatever you’ve told it counts as a result.
So wrong tracking does a lot more damage than one misleading report. Money gets moved towards campaigns that look good in a broken system, and away from ones that are actually selling. And the automation spends the next few months enthusiastically finding you more of the wrong thing.
You can’t optimise what you can’t measure. Every change becomes a guess.
The problems I find most often
These come up again and again, in accounts run by agencies, freelancers and in-house teams alike.
Sales that never get recorded. Somebody buys, and Google never hears about it. This is common after a website rebuild or a change of checkout, when the tracking code gets left behind or put on the wrong page. The account looks worse than it is, and the campaigns doing the work get starved of budget.
Sales that get recorded twice. The opposite problem, and very common. A sale gets counted once by the website tag and again through an import from Google Analytics, so your advertising looks roughly twice as good as it really is. Nobody complains about a report that flatters them, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed.
The wrong things counted as conversions. I see plenty of accounts where somebody landing on the contact page counts as a conversion. Or a click on the email address. Or someone watching a video. These are fine things to know about, but if they sit in the same column as real sales, the monthly report looks wonderful and tells you nothing about whether anybody bought anything.
No value attached to anything. For an online shop, a £12 order and a £400 order are both “one conversion” unless the tracking passes the order value through. Without that, you can’t see return on ad spend at all, only a count of orders.
Phone calls nobody tracks. For a lot of service businesses, the phone is where the real enquiries come in. If calls from your ads aren’t recorded, the account undervalues the very campaigns bringing in your best leads.
Nobody can say what’s being counted. This is the one that tells me most. Ask whoever runs your ads what a conversion is in your account, and if the answer doesn’t fit in one sentence, something needs looking at.
What happened at the Royal Armouries
When I started working with the Royal Armouries online shop in 2023, the in-house team had real ambition. What they didn’t have was reliable data. There were gaps in the conversion tracking, which made it hard to see which ads were actually driving sales, or where spend was being wasted.
So before I rebuilt a single campaign, I fixed the tracking so every online sale was recorded and attributed properly.
Not glamorous. Nobody has ever got excited about a tracking fix. But it gave us a clear view of return on ad spend for the first time, and it’s the data behind every decision since. The new Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, the restructured search campaigns, the rewritten ad copy: all of it has been judged against numbers we could trust.
Year on year, return on ad spend is up 141% on Google Ads and 246% on Meta. The same budgets are working significantly harder. I’d love to tell you that was down to some clever campaign trick, but the honest answer is that it started with measurement.
Why tracking comes before everything else
People are sometimes surprised that I won’t touch the campaigns until the tracking is sorted. It feels like a delay. You’ve brought someone in to improve your advertising and they spend the first fortnight on something you can’t see.
My reasoning is simple. If I change your campaigns while the numbers are wrong, I’ve no way of knowing whether my changes worked. Neither do you. And if Google’s automated bidding is involved, which it almost always is now, it’s learning from those wrong numbers every single day.
Fix the measurement first and every decision after that has something solid under it. Including the uncomfortable ones, like switching off a campaign that someone in the business is rather attached to.
It also changes the budget conversation. If you’re being asked to justify next year’s spend, I’ve written about how I’d work out a marketing budget, and every step of that sum depends on knowing what an enquiry or a sale currently costs you. With broken tracking, you don’t know.
Three checks you can do this week
You don’t need to be technical for any of these, and you don’t need to tell anyone you’re doing them.
1. Ask for the one-sentence answer. Email whoever runs your ads and ask what counts as a conversion in your account, and which of those conversions the bidding is using. You want a short list of real things: a purchase, a completed enquiry form, a call over a certain length. If page views or clicks are on the list, ask why.
2. Trace one real sale. Pick a single order or enquiry you know came from advertising last month and ask to see it in the Google Ads reporting. You’re checking that it’s there at all, and that it’s there once.
3. Compare the totals. Take last month’s conversions as reported by Google Ads and put them next to what your sales records or your CRM say came in. They’ll never match exactly, because people come to you through more than one route. But if Google is claiming 200 orders and the shop took 120 in total, you’ve found your problem.
If any of those three throws up something odd, start there, before anyone touches the ad copy or asks you for a bigger budget.
There are six more checks along the same lines in my post on whether your Google Ads agency is wasting your budget, if you want to keep going.
If you’d like someone to look with you
Tracking audits are a big part of what I do as a Google Ads specialist and fractional CMO. Fixing the problem is usually a day or two of work. The hard part is knowing it’s there.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your account, book a free consultation and I’ll tell you, in plain English, whether your numbers can be trusted. Sometimes the answer is yes, and you get to stop worrying about it. That’s a lovely conversation too.