Google says you got 40 conversions. Your phone says otherwise.
When the account says it's working and the business says it isn't, believe the business. Then go and fix the tracking.
Here's a situation that comes up a lot.
The report says the account had a good month. Plenty of conversions, cost per conversion looking healthy. The business owner says the phone's been quiet and they can't remember the last decent enquiry.
They're both looking at real numbers. Only one of them is looking at customers.
(The 40 in the title is just an example. The gap can be any size.)
What Google calls a conversion
A conversion is whatever the account has been told to count. That might be a phone call, a form, a booking. It might also be a page view, someone clicking your address, or a form counted twice because two different tags are both counting it.
Google doesn't know which of those matter to your business. It just counts what it's been told to count, and then goes looking for more of it.
The usual culprits
- Soft actions counted as leads. Page views, time on site and clicks on a map are not enquiries. If they're set as main conversions, the numbers look great and mean nothing.
- Double counting. The same form counted by Google Ads and again by an import from Analytics.
- Every conversion counted. For leads, someone filling in your form three times should count once.
- Spam counted as leads. Junk form fills and 5-second calls still count unless you've set things up so they don't.
- Real leads not counted at all. If most customers phone you and calls aren't tracked, the account can't see your best leads.
I've written a ten-minute check you can do yourself if you want to look at your own account.
Why it matters more than it looks
It's tempting to think wrong tracking is just a reporting problem. It isn't. Google's automated bidding uses those conversions to decide who to show your ads to and how much to pay. Feed it rubbish and it gets very good at finding more rubbish.
That's why tracking is the first thing I check on any account, before keywords, before ads, before anything else. Every other decision rests on it.
Believe the business
If the account says it's working and the business says it isn't, believe the business. Then go and fix the tracking.