You wouldn’t adjust your route based on a broken compass. But that’s exactly what most businesses do with their ad campaigns.
The tracking gap nobody talks about
Every week I audit ad accounts where the owner is “optimizing” — adjusting bids, testing headlines, reshuffling budgets. The problem? Their conversion tracking is broken, incomplete, or measuring the wrong things entirely.
Here’s what I typically find:
- Form submissions counted, but not qualified leads. A spam submission and a real buyer look identical in Google Ads.
- No GCLID persistence. The click ID that ties a lead back to the exact keyword that generated it? Lost somewhere between the landing page and the CRM.
- Thank-you page firing on refresh. One real lead becomes three “conversions” because the confirmation page isn’t deduplicated.
What to check before you optimize anything
Before touching a single bid or headline, verify these fundamentals:
- Is your conversion action firing correctly? Test it yourself. Fill out the form. Check Google Ads > Tools > Conversions. Does the number go up by exactly one?
- Are you tracking the right event? A page view is not a lead. A form submission is not a qualified lead. Define what actually matters to your business.
- Is attribution working end-to-end? Can you trace a closed deal back to the keyword that started it? If not, you’re flying blind.
The uncomfortable truth
Most campaign “optimizations” are just rearranging deck chairs. The real leverage is in the unglamorous work: making sure your data is clean, your tracking is accurate, and your reporting reflects reality.
Fix the measurement. Then optimize. In that order.