Check what your Google Ads is counting as a conversion

Google Ads bids, budgets and reports all lean on one number: conversions. If that number counts the wrong thing, or counts the right thing twice, every decision built on it is off. It is the first thing worth checking in any account.

Find your conversion list

In Google Ads, open Goals, then Conversions, then Summary. You will see every action the account tracks, where each one comes from, and whether it is a primary or secondary action.

Four things to look at

• Primary vs secondary. Only primary actions are used for bidding and show in the Conversions column. A page view or a scroll set as primary will make results look better than they are.
• Duplicates. The same action tracked twice, for example once by a Google Ads tag and again as an imported Google Analytics event, doubles your count. Keep one as primary.
• Count setting. For leads, "One" per click is usually right: one person filling in two forms is still one lead. For sales, "Every" makes sense.
• Status. Anything showing "No recent conversions" or "Inactive" for weeks may have broken when the website changed.

Test it for real

Do the action yourself: submit the form, click the phone number, finish a test booking. Then check the action shows a new conversion within a day. If it does not, the tag is not firing for that path. Button text and page changes are common culprits.

Why it matters

Smart bidding learns from whatever you tell it is a conversion. Feed it a clean, honest signal and it finds more of the right people. Feed it noise and it gets very good at finding noise.