The Google Ads account that was buying page views, not customers.

01How it looked

A business in West Sussex had been running ads for months. On paper it was working. The conversion count was healthy and rising, the cost per conversion was falling, and Google’s own interface was showing green arrows.

The owner’s experience was different. The phone was not ringing noticeably more than before the ads started, and the money was leaving every week.

When somebody tells me the numbers say one thing and their bank account says another, I believe the bank account and go looking for what the numbers are actually measuring.

02What a conversion is, and why it matters so much

A conversion is whatever you have told Google counts as success. That is the whole definition. Google does not know what your business wants, so it does what you told it.

This matters more than anything else in the account because modern campaigns bid automatically. You set a goal and Google’s system spends your budget chasing it, adjusting bids thousands of times a day. It is genuinely very good at this.

Which means if you point it at the wrong goal, it will pursue the wrong goal with enormous competence, and every report will show it succeeding.

03What had happened here

The conversion set up in this account was a page view. Somebody lands on the site, they have converted. That was it.

So the bidding had spent months learning how to buy the cheapest possible page views. It found people who would click and arrive and leave, because those were plentiful and cheap, and it bought more and more of them.

It was not broken. It was working exactly as designed, towards a target that had nothing to do with getting work. Nobody had set it up maliciously. Somebody had set it up quickly, and quickly usually means accepting the default.

04How to check your own in five minutes

In Google Ads, go to Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. You will see a list of the things being counted.

Look at the Conversion action column and the source. What you want to see are form submissions and phone calls. What you do not want to see, at least not counted as primary conversions, are page views, button clicks that do not submit anything, time on site, or anything described as "engaged session".

Also check the Conversion action optimisation setting. Anything marked Primary is what the bidding chases. Anything marked Secondary is recorded but not optimised for. A lot of accounts have soft measures set as Primary, which is the same problem in a subtler form.

05Fixing it, and what to expect

Set up a real conversion. A form submission or a phone call from the site, tracked properly so Google knows it happened. Mark it Primary and demote everything else to Secondary.

Then expect the numbers to get worse before they get better, and do not panic when they do. Your conversion count will fall off a cliff, because you have stopped counting worthless things. Your cost per conversion will go up for the same reason. Neither means anything has broken.

The system then needs to relearn. Give it around thirty clicks per keyword before you judge anything, which depending on your budget is a few weeks. What you are watching is not the dashboard. It is whether the phone rings.

06The general lesson

Any automated system will optimise for what you measure, ruthlessly, including the bits you did not mean. That is not a flaw in the advertising platform, it is the nature of the thing.

So before you look at any advertising report, ask what it is counting. If the answer is not something that puts money in the business, the rest of the report is decoration.