Google's bidding will get you more of whatever you tell it success looks like. It is very good at this. Which means if you have told it that success is a form submission, and half your form submissions are spam, it will go and find you more spam, efficiently and at scale.
In most accounts we audit, the conversion action being optimised for is not the one the business actually cares about. Not broken, just pointed at the wrong thing, which is harder to spot and costs more.
Decide what actually counts
A conversion should be something that makes you money, or reliably leads to money. Be strict about this.
- A qualified enquiry counts. A page view does not.
- A phone call over thirty seconds counts. A ten second wrong number does not.
- A purchase counts, and it should carry its real value, not a flat number you picked.
- Newsletter signups, PDF downloads and time on page are not conversions. They are consolation prizes, and if you count them Google will optimise towards people who collect PDFs.
If you have several conversion actions, only the ones you genuinely want more of should be marked as primary. Everything else can be recorded as secondary so you can still see it without bidding towards it.
Set it up before you build the campaign
Tracking added later does not backfill. Every pound you spend before it works is a pound you cannot learn anything from, and the bidding has no history to learn from either, so it starts from nothing on the day you fix it.
This is the single most tempting step to skip, because setting up tracking is dull and launching a campaign is exciting. It is also the one that costs the most to skip.
Prove it works, do not assume
The dashboard saying the tag is active means the tag fired. It does not mean it fired at the right moment, or that it recorded the right thing.
- 1Submit your own form, make your own phone call, or place a test order.
- 2Wait. Conversions can take a few hours to appear, so do not conclude it is broken at the ten minute mark.
- 3Check the conversion appears, once, with the value you expected.
- 4Check it did not also record three other things at the same time, which is the usual symptom of a tag firing on every page.
Where AI actually helps here
Not with the setup itself, which is a handful of settings and a tag. With the diagnosis, which is the hard part.
- Working through why a conversion is not recording, in order, rather than you guessing.
- Reading what is currently being counted and telling you plainly whether it makes sense for your business.
- Working out what a conversion should be worth, from your own margins rather than a round number.
- Spotting double counting, which is very hard to see in the interface and obvious in the raw data.
Give it your account data and your margins. Never ask it to estimate either.