Google Ads report success. The phone stays silent.
The account shows dozens of conversions for next to nothing. The phone barely rings. Usually it comes down to one setting that almost nobody checks.
Over the past few weeks, several businesses got in touch with me with the same sentence.
"Our Google Ads are not bringing in any jobs."
I opened their accounts and found almost the same thing everywhere. A Smart campaign that Google runs on its own, and conversion tracking that measures something completely different from enquiries.
Every audit ended the same way. More than 70 % of the budget went to people who could never have become customers.
What a conversion actually is
A conversion is an action Google treats as a success of your ad. Typically a phone call or a submitted form.
What counts as a conversion, though, is decided by the account settings. And that is where it all starts.
Google also counts a click on the Directions button as a success. Someone asks for directions to your premises and the account records a win.
For one car repair shop, that was 193 of 232 conversions. For a maker of custom furniture, 19 of 23.
In both cases, 83 %.
Not a single form submitted on the website was counted.
Google is like a satnav
It takes you exactly where you tell it to.
Type in the wrong address and it will not take you where you want to go. It will reliably take you to the wrong place. And it will act as if the trip went perfectly.
Advertising works the same way. Google learns from whatever you report as success. Report clicks on Directions, and it goes looking for more people who click on Directions.
Like a regular customer driving over to pick up their car after a repair. They would have come without the ad.
You just paid for them.
The numbers look great, the money disappears
The nasty part is that the account looks fine.
The car repair shop saw 56 CZK per conversion in the overview. Sounds excellent.
But when I counted only the calls Google actually measured, it came to 566 CZK per call. Ten times more.
The furniture maker spent a third of the budget on banners on other websites and videos on YouTube. The clicks were cheap. Not a single contact came from them.
What to do about it
Before you add a single extra coin to your ads, open the conversions overview in your account and look at what is being counted.
Only real enquiries belong among the primary conversions. Calls from the ad, calls from the website and submitted forms. Keep clicks on Directions for reference if you like, but Google must not optimise for them.
After it is sent, a form should lead to a thank you page. That is what lets you count every submission.
One more thing about Smart campaigns. Their negative keywords do not cover close variants. Exclude "opel service" and the ad can still show for "authorised opel service". If you want control over what you pay for, you need a classic search campaign.
Only then does it make sense to fine tune the campaign and raise the budget.
I wrote about where money gets lost in Google Ads in the article Google Ads work. You just have to dig your way to them. Tracking was one of three places there. After these recent audits, I would put it first.
Summary
Google does exactly what you tell it to.
Tell it that success means directions, and it brings you directions.
Tell it that success means an enquiry, and it starts looking for people who enquire.
The difference between those two settings is a few clicks in the account. And quite possibly most of your budget.
Vladimír
P.S. Not sure what your account counts as a conversion? Get in touch, I will go through it and show you in numbers. You can see what our Google Ads management looks like on our website. All the best.