Google Ads says 284 conversions. We counted about 30 real leads

Google Ads can report many times more conversions than you have real enquiries, because some conversion actions count things that are not leads. On one of our client accounts, a local appliance repair business, the last 30 days showed 284 conversions. The real leads were about 30. The rest came from actions that Google creates or hosts itself, and they were quietly feeding the numbers we used to judge the campaigns. If you pay for Ads management, or manage your own, this check is worth doing before you trust any cost per lead.

What the numbers were

For the 30 days to 10 October, the account was counting 284 conversions. The actions that reflected real enquiries were:

• contact form submitted on the website: 8,
• phone number click on the website: 20,
• calls from ads, through call reporting: 2.

That is about 30. The remainder was made up mainly of:

• Clicks to call, an action Google hosts, which counts a tap on the call button inside the ad itself. It was set to count every tap, to be a primary action, and sat in the account's default "Contact" goal across all five campaigns. It counted 105.
• Local actions, other engagements, 88, and Local actions, directions, 29. These come from Google's own listings and maps activity. They sat in goals not used by any campaign, so they inflated the "all conversions" column without feeding bidding.

A tap on a call button is not nothing, because some of those people do ring. But a tap does not tell you whether a call connected or how long it lasted, so it is a weaker signal than a recorded call or a submitted form.

Primary and secondary actions

Each conversion action in Google Ads is either primary or secondary. Primary actions count in the Conversions column and are used by automatic bidding. Secondary actions are recorded for your information and do not steer bids. The trap with Google-hosted actions is that they often arrive as primary by default and sit in a goal you never chose. On this account, Clicks to call was primary, and the way Google's own controls are laid out meant we could only deal with it by taking its goal out of use.

Why it matters

A bid strategy and a human reader both trust the conversion column. If it includes 105 taps and 117 engagement events, three things go wrong.

1. Cost per lead looks far better than it is. Divide spend by 284 and the account looks efficient. Divide by 30 and you get a very different figure.
2. Keywords look like they convert when they do not. The search terms report shows conversions per term. Those include the Clicks to call, so the "converting" terms are not necessarily lead terms.
3. Automatic bidding learns the wrong thing. If you switch to Maximise conversions or a target cost per action while the junk is counted, the system optimises for the easiest actions, which are call taps and map clicks.

The same account had the opposite problem earlier. In September it had no working website conversion actions at all, and Google recorded 3 conversions for the whole month. So the numbers were too low before they were too high, and neither said much about real leads.

How we found and fixed it

We listed every action in the Ads goals summary and compared each one with what the website itself recorded. That showed which three were Google-hosted and which were real.

The fix is a few steps, and it deletes nothing:

1. In Goals, then Summary, expand the "Contact" goal.
2. Move the real action, the website phone number click, into a lead goal such as "Submit lead form".
3. Turn off "account default" on the Contact goal so that it no longer counts toward campaigns.

After this, the Contact goal was used by none of the five campaigns, which we checked.

A detail that matters: you cannot simply mark Clicks to call as secondary. Its optimisation setting is greyed out because Google hosts the action. The workaround is to take its goal out of use, not to edit the action.

What to do with your own account

1. Open Goals, then Summary, and list every conversion action.
2. For each, note the source. Treat Google hosted and automatically created actions as suspect.
3. Check whether each is primary and which campaigns' goals include it.
4. Compare your total with a count you trust, such as form entries in your inbox and calls in your phone log, for the same dates.
5. Until the two roughly agree, do not use automatic bidding for conversions, and do not rank keywords by conversions.

Do this check once a quarter and after any change to goals.

Why this is the first job in Ads management

Cleaning up conversions comes before changing bids, ads or budgets, because every later decision rests on those numbers. When we manage an account, you keep your own Google Ads account, add us as a manager, and pay Google directly for your clicks. We charge for the management, which is the Ads management add-on at $549 a month, month to month. Our pricing page has the details. For the tracking side of the same problem, see why Google Ads tracking breaks without anyone noticing.