How to Tell if Your Google Ads Are Actually Working

Here is how to tell if your Google Ads are working: count the leads that arrived carrying a Google click id, not the clicks. Every time somebody clicks your ad, Google adds a parameter to the address of the page they land on. If your website records that parameter alongside each form fill and phone tap, you can say exactly what the ads produced. If it does not record it, nobody can answer the question honestly, and that includes whoever runs the account.

Owners ask me this the same way every time. They are spending somewhere between $800 and $3,000 a month, the report says impressions are up and cost per click is down, and the phone does not feel any busier than it did in March. Half of them quietly suspect the numbers are being dressed up. The frustrating part is that both sides are usually arguing from data that cannot settle it. Google Ads not generating leads and Google Ads generating leads you never counted look identical from inside the dashboard.

Why the Ads dashboard cannot answer the question

Search Google for whether your ads are running and the first result is Google's own help page about ad status. That page is genuinely useful for a different problem: is my ad approved, is it eligible, is my budget capped. It tells you nothing about whether the money turned into work.

The dashboard's own metrics have the same limitation. Impressions count how many times your ad appeared. Clicks count how many people tapped it. Click through rate is those two divided. Every one of those goes up when you raise your bid, which means a report full of green arrows can describe a month where you bought more traffic and got nothing back.

The one column that should matter, Conversions, is the one I trust least on small accounts. More on that below, because it is the single most common reason an owner and an agency end up shouting past each other.

How to tell if your Google Ads are working: follow the click id

A click id is a string that the ad platform staples onto the end of your landing page address when somebody clicks an ad. Google has done this for years, through a setting called auto-tagging. If auto-tagging is switched on in your account, which it is by default, a visitor who clicks your ad does not arrive at yoursite.com. They arrive at yoursite.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQ and a long tail of characters.

That string is the receipt. It identifies one specific click on one specific ad. Every major platform does its own version, so once you know what to look for you can tell Google traffic from Meta traffic from Microsoft traffic without any tools at all.

You do not need to understand the difference between gbraid and wbraid to run a business. For your purposes all three of the Google parameters mean the same thing: a Google ad sent this person. What you do need to know is that if none of these ever show up on your site, either nobody is clicking your ads or the tracking is broken, and both are worth finding out today.

Read one yourself, free, in about a minute

1. 1Open a private or incognito window so your own history does not interfere.
2. 2Search the exact phrase one of your ads targets, from the area you advertise in. If your ad shows, click it. Yes, this costs you one click. It is the cheapest audit you will ever run.
3. 3Look at the address bar on the page you land on. You are looking for ?gclid= or &gclid= followed by a long string. On an iPhone you may see gbraid or wbraid instead.
4. 4Now go straight to your contact form and submit a test enquiry with something obvious in the message, like TEST FROM AD CLICK, and the date.
5. 5Check where that enquiry lands. Does the email, the CRM entry, or the spreadsheet row have the click id anywhere in it? If not, that is your gap, and it is the whole reason nobody can tell you if the ads work.

A worked example: 412 clicks to two customers

Here is a month laid out the way it should be. The numbers below are an illustration, not a client's figures, but they are the shape of a real small-account month and the arithmetic is what matters.

Look at what happens to the story depending on where you stop reading. Stop at clicks and it looks like a good month: 412 people came to the site for three and a half dollars each. Stop at form fills and it looks alarming, $161 for a lead. Count the phone taps and the cost per lead drops by 40 percent, because six of the fifteen leads were invisible until you counted them.

Then the last line. Two customers at $725 of ad spend each. Whether that is a triumph or a disaster depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you. If you are a roofer, $725 to win a $14,000 job is an obvious yes and you should be asking why you are not spending more. If you sell $180 tune-ups and you do not get repeat work, you are losing money on every sale and no amount of campaign optimization fixes it.

Why the conversions number in your account is usually wrong

When an agency says the ads are working, they almost always point at the Conversions column. On accounts I have inherited, that column has been wrong more often than it has been right. These are the faults I run into repeatedly:

• The thank-you page fires on every page load. Somebody put the conversion tag in the site footer instead of on one page, so every visit counts as a conversion. Reported conversions then roughly equal reported clicks, which nobody notices because it looks like a spectacular result.
• Phone taps are not tracked at all. For a trade business this hides most of the leads. The ads then look worse than they are, and the account gets cut for the wrong reason.
• Soft actions are counted as conversions. Clicking to the pricing page, scrolling to the bottom, spending 30 seconds on the site. These get set up as conversions, and they inflate the count with people who never contacted you.
• Spam form fills are counted the same as real ones. If a third of your form entries are bots selling SEO services, a third of your reported conversions are fiction.
• Nothing is deduplicated. One person who fills the form and then calls is two conversions, which is fine as a signal and misleading as a lead count.

None of that requires bad faith. It is what happens when tracking is set up once, at launch, by whoever was cheapest, and never audited. But it is why you should treat the conversion count as a claim to verify rather than an answer.

Three questions that end the argument

If somebody else manages your account, these three questions get you to the truth faster than any report. Ask them in writing.

1. 1Show me the last ten leads that came from the ads, with the date and the page they landed on. Not a count. The actual leads. A well-run account can produce this in a few minutes. If the answer is that the system does not work like that, you have learned something important.
2. 2What exactly counts as a conversion in this account, and when was that last checked? You want a list: form submitted, phone tapped, and nothing else. If page views, scroll depth or time on site are in there, the conversion number is not a lead number.
3. 3Are phone taps from mobile counted, and how? Roughly two thirds of local searches happen on a phone, and on a phone people call rather than type. If the answer is no, your ads have been performing better than the reports say all along.

A good manager will welcome all three, because the answers usually make their work look better, not worse. What you are watching for is defensiveness or a change of subject.

When the honest answer is that Google Ads is not worth it

Sometimes you do the whole exercise, the tracking is clean, and the ads still do not pay. That is a real outcome and it deserves to be said out loud. Google Ads tends to disappoint when the average job is small and there is no repeat business, when the click prices in your category run past what a lead could ever be worth, or when the site people land on does not convince anybody. That last one is the most common by a distance. Buying traffic to a page that does not answer the visitor's question is paying to be rejected faster.

If you are early in this and still working out what to spend, our guide on a realistic Google Ads budget for a small business covers what a starting budget actually buys, and what Google Ads management costs covers what the management fee should look like on top.

Doing this check automatically

You can do everything above by hand, and plenty of owners should. Export the leads from your inbox once a month, note which ones arrived with a click id in the landing URL, put them in a spreadsheet next to the spend from the Ads account, and add a column for which ones closed. It takes about an hour a month once the habit is set, it costs nothing, and it is a far better instrument than any dashboard you are currently being shown.

The automatic version is what we built Venbit Analytics to do. It is first-party analytics for small business owners: one script tag, no cookies, bots excluded. It reads the click id off the landing URL, stores it with the lead, and keeps the actual form submissions and phone taps in an inbox rather than as a number. That is what makes the "did the ads work" verdict possible: it is the same check described above, run for you, with a push alert on your phone when a lead comes in. It is free for Venbit clients and there is no public price yet. If you would rather we just looked at the account, our Google Ads management starts with exactly this audit.