Conversion tracking
Why clicks do not always turn into enquiries
A campaign can look healthy in the platform while almost nobody enquires. There are six common reasons for the gap between a click and an enquiry, and only one of them is the campaign.
The gap between a click and an enquiry is where most advertising budgets quietly go missing.
A campaign can look healthy in the platform. Reasonable click through rate, sensible cost per click, steady spend. Then you open the enquiry log and there is almost nothing in it.
There are a handful of common reasons for that gap.
The click was never going to convert
Some traffic is cheap because nobody wanted the thing on the other end of it. Broad match keywords, audience expansion and automatic suggestions all widen who sees your ad. That includes people whose search contained your word but whose intention was entirely different.
The answer is not always to switch the feature off. It is to read the search terms report, add the irrelevant ones as negatives, and keep doing that every week.
The page does not match the ad
Someone who searched for a specific service and landed on a general home page will often click back and try the next result. The page needs to answer the promise the ad made, in the first screen, without any scrolling.
If your ad mentions emergency repairs and the page opens with a company history, you have lost them.
The form asks for too much
Every field on a form costs you completions. Phone number, company name, budget range, preferred contact time. Some of those earn their place and some do not.
For a first enquiry, name, email and a short message are usually enough. The rest can be gathered on the call.
Nobody followed up quickly
This one sits outside the advertising account and is easy to miss. Enquiries arrive by email, land in a shared inbox and wait. By the time someone replies, the person has moved on.
If your time from enquiry to first contact is measured in days rather than hours, the campaign is not the main problem.
The tracking is measuring the wrong event
When the platform believes a conversion happened and it did not, the account optimises towards that belief. A thank you page that loads for everyone, or a form submission event that fires before validation, teaches the platform to find more people who do that and fewer people who buy.
Test the tracking yourself. Submit a test enquiry and watch what the platform records. Then remove the test.
Where to start
Test the tracking first, because every decision after it depends on it. Then look at the search terms report and the landing page. Those three cover the majority of cases we see.
If you would like a second opinion, a free audit will look at all three on your account and tell you which one is costing you the most.
Sources and further reading
Tracking setup described in these articles comes from Google's own documentation.
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