What should I track as a conversion in Google Ads?

The actions that mean real business: phone calls from your ads and from your website, completed contact or quote forms, and bookings. These are your primary conversions. Softer actions like clicking a phone number or viewing a page can be tracked as secondary signals, but they should not be counted as leads.

What is the difference between a primary and secondary conversion?

A primary conversion is a real lead or sale you want Google to optimise towards, like a form submission or a phone call. A secondary conversion is a useful but weaker signal you want to see but not bid on, like a click to call that never connects. Getting this split right stops Google chasing the wrong actions.

Do I need Google Tag Manager for conversion tracking?

Not strictly, but it makes life much easier. Google Tag Manager gives you one clean place to manage GA4, Google Ads conversions and call tracking without editing site code every time. For anything beyond the most basic setup, it is worth using.

Why does Google Ads show conversions but I am not getting leads?

Usually the tracking is counting the wrong thing. If a conversion fires on a page view or a phone-number click rather than a real call or form submission, the numbers look healthy while your phone stays quiet. Auditing exactly what triggers each conversion is the first thing to check.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking Explained

If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it

Plenty of businesses run Google Ads for months with no real idea whether it is working. The account shows clicks, maybe even “conversions”, but the phone is not ringing any more than usual. Almost always, the problem is the same: the conversion tracking is either missing or measuring the wrong thing.

Conversion tracking is the foundation of everything in paid search. It is how you know which ads, keywords and searches actually bring you work, so your budget goes to what pays and not to what does not. Here is what to measure and how to set it up so the numbers mean something. This is a core part of proper Google Ads management.

Primary versus secondary conversions

Not every action is worth the same. The first job is to split them.

Primary conversions are the actions that mean real business:

A phone call from your ad (a call extension or call-only ad).
A phone call from your website after someone clicked through.
A completed contact or quote form.
A booking or appointment request.

These are what you want Google to optimise towards, because they are as close to a paying customer as tracking gets.

Secondary conversions are weaker signals that are useful to see but should not drive bidding:

Someone clicking a phone number (which does not mean they called).
Reaching a key page.
Starting but not finishing a form.

Mixing these up is one of the most common and costly mistakes. If Google is optimising towards “clicked the phone number”, it will happily find you more people who click and never call.

What it runs on

The plumbing behind good tracking is straightforward:

GA4 for site analytics and to see the full journey.
Google Tag Manager as one clean place to manage your tags without editing code every time.
Enhanced conversions, which use hashed, privacy-safe data to recover conversions that would otherwise be missed.
Proper thank-you pages or confirmation events, so a form only counts when it is actually submitted, not when someone lands on the page.

For calls, you want call tracking that records an actual connected call of a sensible length, not just a tap on the number. And if leads are qualified or closed offline, feeding that back in tells Google which leads were actually any good, not just which ones filled in a form.

The mistakes that quietly wreck your data

A few things trip almost everyone up:

Counting the same lead twice. A form fires a conversion, and so does the thank-you page view, so one enquiry shows as two. Your cost-per-lead looks half what it really is.
Tracking clicks, not leads. A phone-number tap counts as a conversion even though nobody spoke to you.
Never testing it. The tracking was set up once, a page changed, and it silently stopped firing months ago. Nobody noticed because nobody checked.
Ignoring lead quality. Fifty form fills sounds great until you learn forty were spam or tyre-kickers. Without offline feedback, Google keeps chasing the same low-quality traffic.

If your account shows conversions but your enquiries have not moved, one of these is almost certainly the culprit. It is the same story behind a lot of “Google Ads does not work for me” complaints, and it usually sits in the tracking or the website itself, not the ads.

A simple pre-launch checklist

Before you spend a dollar, confirm:

Every primary conversion (calls, forms, bookings) is set up and marked primary.
Softer actions are tracked as secondary, not counted as leads.
Each conversion has been tested and actually fires, once, on the real action.
No double-counting between form submissions and thank-you page views.
GA4 and Search Console are connected and reporting.
You know how you will judge lead quality, not just lead quantity.

Get this right and Google Ads becomes something you can actually steer. Get it wrong and you are paying for numbers that do not mean anything.

If you want your tracking set up so it measures real jobs, not vanity clicks, get in touch. For the bigger picture on what running an account properly involves, see what Google Ads management actually includes, and for setting a sensible budget, how much you should spend on Google Ads.