What a free audit finds every single time.
We dig into a lot of accounts for a free audit. You’d expect every account to have its own story. The results do. The problems don’t. Four things come up so consistently that we now check for them first.
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Tracking that broke during the last redesign. The frontrunner. Someone builds a new site, the old conversion tag doesn’t make the move, and nobody notices, because the campaigns keep running fine. For months the agency reports conversions that no longer exist, or misses conversions that are actually happening. (Our own miss: we once went weeks without spotting this after a change to a thank-you page.)
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Conversions that aren’t leads. The account counts “conversions,” but click through and they’re newsletter sign-ups, PDF downloads, or a tap on the phone number that never became a call. Smart Bidding optimizes hard toward that number. So you’re paying for an algorithm that’s steering toward the wrong goal.
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Windows that don’t line up. The conversion window in Google Ads is set to 90 days, the monthly report counts 30, and the year-over-year comparison uses a different period again. Three numbers, three stories, all of them “true.” Nobody’s lying; the figures just aren’t comparable.
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A cost-per-lead that doesn’t add up. Almost always because Google Ads conversions and GA4 events have been mixed together. We wrote a separate note on that one.
What we do about it. Nothing magic. We check that the measurement is right before we look at the campaigns. Optimizing a campaign on broken measurement is bailing out a boat without plugging the leak, and it’s exactly the step a quick audit skips.
You’ll know within half an hour whether this is happening on your account. Checking is free.