What to count as a conversion in a trade Google Ads account

Why it matters so much

Most accounts now use some form of automated bidding, such as Maximise conversions or a target cost per acquisition. These strategies learn from the conversions the account records and look for more people like the ones who converted. If a tap on your phone number counts the same as a booked survey, the system cannot tell them apart, and it will happily buy the cheaper one.

So the question is not “what can we track?” but “what do we want more of?” For almost every trade, the answer is genuine enquiries from people in your area, for work you do.

Count these as primary conversions

Google Ads lets you mark each conversion action as primary, which is used for bidding and reported in the Conversions column, or secondary, which is recorded for observation only. These belong in primary:

• Calls from ads that last longer than a minimum length. Google counts a call as a conversion only when it lasts longer than the length you set. Pick a threshold that fits how long a real enquiry call takes in your trade, so misdials and quick hang-ups are not counted.
• Calls to the number on your website from people who arrived from an ad, using a Google forwarding number shown to those visitors, with the same kind of minimum length.
• Completed enquiry forms, counted when the form is actually sent: on the confirmation page or a confirmed submission event, not when someone opens the contact page.

Keep these secondary, or leave them out

• Clicks on your phone number. A tap is not a call. Plenty never connect, and some are accidental.
• Visits to your contact page, time on site, pages viewed and scroll depth. Useful for diagnosis, misleading as targets.
• Clicks on email links. You cannot tell whether an email was ever sent.
• Calls below your minimum length. They are worth seeing, not worth bidding for.

None of these are useless. They just should not be what the bidding is trying to produce.

Count each enquiry once

Double counting is common in trade accounts and makes every figure look better than it is. The usual causes are a form that fires its tag twice, a thank-you page that counts again when refreshed, and the same form counted by both a Google Ads tag and an imported Google Analytics event.

For enquiry conversions, set the count option to “One” rather than “Every”, so repeat submissions after the same ad click are not counted again. Then check that each enquiry is recorded by one conversion action only.

Give enquiries sensible values, or none

If some enquiries are worth far more than others, such as a boiler installation compared with a service, conversion values can help bidding favour the valuable ones. Keep values simple and defensible: a rough average job value multiplied by how often that kind of enquiry becomes a job. If you cannot estimate it honestly, leave values off until you can.

Feed real outcomes back to Google

The strongest signal you can give Google Ads is which enquiries turned into work. There are two common ways to do it:

• Offline conversion imports, where you upload the enquiries that became quotes or jobs, matched to the original ad click.
• Enhanced conversions for leads, where the details a customer types into your form, such as an email address, are hashed and used to match later outcomes back to the ad.

Both need a reliable record of what happened to each enquiry, which is why a simple enquiry log, kept up to date, is worth more than any tracking tool. Both also handle personal data, so they need to sit behind a cookie banner that works and a privacy notice that explains it.

Check it against reality every month

Make a test call and send a test form after any change to the site or the tracking, and confirm both appear in the account. Then, every month, compare the conversions Google Ads reports with the enquiries you actually remember receiving. If Google reports noticeably more, something is double counting. If it reports fewer, something is not being tracked. Either way, fix the tracking before judging the campaigns.

We set this up as part of lead tracking and reporting. If you are not sure what your account counts today, a campaign review will tell you.