So your Google Ads account has been running for a while now. Some months feel good. Others feel quieter than you would like. You get the odd enquiry and you can make a reasonable guess that it came from the ads, but you are not really sure. The card keeps getting debited every month and somewhere in the back of your mind a voice is saying: I should probably get someone to look into this.
You are not alone. Most property services and trades owners we speak to who are running Google Ads have the uneasy feeling about whether it is actually working. And once you know what a Google Ads audit actually looks for, it is easy to see why.
We have looked under the hood of a lot of accounts over the years. The same problem comes up almost every single time.
The Right Instinct, Just Without the Right Setup
Before getting to what is broken, it is worth saying what you already have right.
Being on Google Ads at all puts you ahead of a lot of your competition. The people searching for your service right now are the people most likely to hire someone this week. You want to be visible to them. That instinct is correct.
Plenty of business owners are making genuinely good decisions inside their accounts, too. Choosing specific services to promote. Trying to keep the spend in check. Writing ads that actually describe what they do. None of that is for nothing.
But the best ad copy in the world only takes you so far if the campaign underneath cannot tell you which clicks turned into work and which ones were just expensive noise. And that is where the pattern we see in every Google Ads audit starts.
Why Every Google Ads Audit Finds the Same Thing
When we run a Google Ads audit on an account that has been managed by the business owner or inherited from a previous provider, the finding is almost always the same.
The campaigns are running. Ads are appearing. Clicks are being paid for. But the account has no reliable way to measure what is happening after the click.
Conversion tracking is either broken, set up incorrectly, or was never installed in the first place.
That single issue cascades into everything else. The bidding algorithm is learning from the wrong signals. Budget flows to the keywords that generated clicks rather than the keywords that generated enquiries. The reporting tells you what happened on Google’s side of the transaction but almost nothing about what happened on yours. And because you cannot see which clicks became phone calls and which became nothing, you have no real basis to improve anything.
That is the silent heart of the problem that a Google Ads audit uncovers. An account running without tracking is not just missing data. The algorithm is being pointed at the wrong target every single day.
The Google Ads Conversion Tracking Problem in Most Accounts
Google’s own documentation (business.google.com/aunz) describes Google Ads conversion tracking as a free tool that lets you understand the actions a customer takes after clicking an ad. A conversion might be a phone call, a form submission, a booking or any other action that represents a real business outcome.
On paper, setting it up is straightforward. In practice, when we audit accounts, one or more of these issues keeps showing up.
Phone call conversions are not being tracked at all, so none of the enquiries that come through the phone show up in the data. Form submissions are not registering as conversions due to technical issues in the background. Or conversion tracking is setup on vanity metrics like clicks rather than metrics that matter, like actual form submissions.
Any one of those is enough to make the account’s data meaningless. A campaign that reports plenty of conversions when most of them are false positives is making decisions on bad information. So is a campaign that reports almost none because the tag never fired in the first place.
Google Ads conversion tracking is not the glamorous part of the account, it can get quite tricky. However, everything else sits on top of it. And in most of the accounts we audit, that foundation is the thing most in need of attention.
What Running Without Tracking Actually Costs You
The cost is not always obvious month to month. That is part of what makes it so easy to leave alone.
What usually happens is this. Budget keeps being spent. Clicks keep being paid for. The enquiries that come through are a mix of genuine leads and people who were never going to hire anyone. You cannot tell the difference from the reporting, so you cannot shift spend toward the campaigns that are actually producing. You cannot identify the keywords eating through the budget without generating work. You cannot see which services are responding and which ones have gone quiet.
Every month without that visibility is a month of decisions being made on guesswork. And in an account with even a modest budget, the difference between optimising toward clicks and optimising toward enquiries adds up over a year.
The most expensive Google Ads problem a business owner can have is not a high cost per click. The real expense is spending money every month with no reliable answer to the question: is this actually working and bringing in a return (ROI)?
A Trauma Cleaning Business That Turned It Around
A specialist trauma cleaning and restoration business in Perth came to us after inheriting a Google Ads account from an interstate web developer. The owner thought the setup was reasonable. Calls were coming in. Clicks were happening. But he had no real way to tell which calls were from the ads, which were from referrals or what any of it was actually costing him.
His words, before we touched anything: “I know I’m coming up in front in my head, just not sure of exact amount.”
The first thing we did was install Google Ads conversion tracking. Every phone call from the ads and every form submission tied back to the keyword and the campaign that produced it. For the first time, he could see the real cost of an enquiry.
Then we rebuilt the campaign structure so each service ran separately. Flood, mould, trauma, biohazard. Each with its own campaign, its own budget and its own tracking. Keywords were tightened. A negative keyword list was built out to filter out the searches that had no chance of becoming work. Geo targeting was pulled back to the areas he could actually service.
Within a few months, he had the biggest week he had ever had in the business. Then another. He voluntarily increased his ad spend two to three times over, not because we pushed him to but because the return made it an easy decision. The higher value jobs, flood and mould work in the $10,000 to $15,000 range, started coming through consistently.
A few months later he put his other business, a carpet cleaning operation, on hold. Not because it had failed. Because the trauma work from the ads had become so consistent that splitting his focus no longer made sense.
His message at that point: “I wish I signed up with you 12 months ago.”
What a Google Ads Audit Actually Covers
If you are running ads right now and you are not certain the account is in good shape, a Google Ads audit is the sensible first step. A useful one covers more than just what the campaigns are doing on the surface.
At minimum, a Google Ads audit should work through conversion tracking (both form submissions and phone calls, actually firing on the right events), campaign structure (whether each service has its own campaign or everything is lumped in together), keyword match types (whether you are on broad match and attracting searches loosely related to your business), your negative keyword list (whether it is filtering out the searches that have no chance of becoming work), location targeting (whether you are paying for clicks from outside your service area) and the match between your ads and the landing pages they send traffic to.
Each of those matters. But the tracking is the one that makes everything else visible. Until that is right, the rest of the audit is describing symptoms without a way to confirm what is actually happening.
You can read more about how we approach this on our Google Ads service page, and our case studies page has more on the outcomes from accounts we have rebuilt from similar starting points.
Where to Start
If you are running Google Ads right now and you are not 100% sure what each lead is costing you, the tracking is the first thing worth looking at. Not the budget. Not the ad copy. Not the bid strategy. The tracking.
A clear Google Ads audit tells you where your account actually stands and what the first move should be. If you would like us to take a look at yours, you can book a time here. No pressure. Just a straight look under the hood and an honest answer about what is there.