Tracking · 6 minute read · 5 September 2026
How to check whether your Google Ads conversion tracking actually works
Broken tracking never throws an error. The dashboard renders, the numbers look plausible, and the budget quietly moves toward whatever Google can see. Here is a ten-minute check anyone can run.
Most Google Ads accounts I look at have conversion tracking that is either absent or wrong. Not slightly off. Wrong in a way that means every budget decision made from the data was made on bad information.
The reason it persists is that nothing complains. A missing tag does not produce a warning. A form that fires on page load instead of on submission looks, in the reports, like a form that gets submitted a lot. The account keeps producing some enquiries, so nobody digs.
You do not need a specialist to find out whether yours is working. You need ten minutes and a browser.
Why it matters more than it used to
Google’s bidding now runs almost entirely on conversion data. Target CPA, Maximise Conversions, Performance Max — all of them shift spend toward whatever produces the conversions they can see.
If your phone calls are not tracked, Google cannot see them. It will optimise for something else: form fills from a contact page, or clicks on a brochure download, or nothing at all. The campaigns producing your real work get starved, and the ones producing nothing get funded.
For most industrial and trade businesses, the phone is the main channel. It is also the one most often left uncounted.
The ten-minute check
What does Ads think it is tracking?
In Google Ads, open Goals, then Conversions. List what is there. For each one, note the status and whether it has recorded anything in the last 30 days. Anything marked “No recent conversions” or “Inactive” is a finding. So is a list that does not include phone calls, WhatsApp, or your contact form.
Do the actions yourself
Open your own website in a private window. Click your phone number. Click the WhatsApp button. Fill in and submit the contact form with test details. Then open Google Analytics, go to Reports, then Realtime, and see whether each action appeared as an event within a minute. If it did not appear, it is not being tracked, whatever the settings say.
Count the tags
On your homepage, press Ctrl+U to view the source. Search for G-. Count the distinct measurement IDs. More than one means duplicate tracking, and every visit is probably being counted twice. Search for GTM- as well. Tag Manager plus a hardcoded tag is the classic double-firing setup.
Count the hits
Press F12, open the Network tab, type collect in the filter, and reload the page. Each line is a hit sent to Analytics. One page load should produce one page_view. If you see two or three, the duplicates are confirmed.
Check the import
Back in Ads, open each conversion action and look at the source. It should say Google Analytics (GA4), and the GA4 event name should match what you saw fire in step 2. A conversion action with no source, or one that points at an old Universal Analytics property, is not receiving anything.
What the results mean
| You found | What it means |
|---|---|
| No phone or WhatsApp conversion listed | Your main channel is invisible to bidding |
| Form conversion fires without submitting | Lead count is inflated, cost per lead is fiction |
| Two or more G- IDs in the source | Traffic roughly double what is real |
| Conversion source is empty or UA | Ads has been optimising against nothing |
| Everything fired once, correctly | Rare. Well done. Check the search terms next. |
What to do about it
If step 2 failed, the fix is a Tag Manager container with triggers for each action, tested in Preview mode, then imported into Ads. It is a few hours of work and it changes what every rand of budget is doing from then on.
If step 3 or 4 found duplicates, the fix is removing whichever tag should not be there — usually a hardcoded snippet left in the theme by a previous provider — and confirming the count drops to one.
If the whole thing is a mess, do not start with campaign optimisation. Fix the measurement first. Nothing built on wrong data gets better by being optimised harder.
If you would rather someone else ran the check
A tracking health check costs R1 450 and takes under a week
You get written findings for each of the five steps above, plus the things this article cannot see from outside, like what the tags are actually sending. No obligation to take the remediation.