Hi everyone,
I recently joined a company and took over Google Ads + weekly performance reporting, and I’m running into a major issue that I’m struggling to diagnose.
Context:
I’m fairly new to performance marketing (basic understanding of Google Ads)
Account has been running for several years
Main campaign type: Search, Performance Max (currently paused)
We’re in peak season right now, so scaling should be a priority
The problem:
The data doesn’t make sense.
Google Ads rates campaigns as “very Good” (ads, creatives, keywords, etc.)
Traffic is coming in
But conversions/purchases are either extremely low or inconsistent
Reported numbers don’t align with what we’d realistically expect. Analytics showed different ( good and realistic) numbers than Google Ads Manager. Last week both showed nearly the same (after I reported the problem) and now both look unrealisticly horrible.
This makes me suspect that conversion tracking has been broken or unreliable for a long time. (ROAS has been 0,27 for years
What we’ve done so far:
I flagged the issue to our developer
They checked and adjusted event tracking (purchase events, etc.)
For a short period, the data looked more realistic
Now, a week later, numbers are off again
Current situation:
We paused our Performance Max campaign because we don’t trust the data
At the same time, we should be scaling due to seasonality
Right now, it feels like we’d be scaling blindly
Main questions:
What’s the most reliable way to validate if conversion tracking is actually working correctly (end-to-end)?
What are common causes for tracking “working temporarily” and then breaking again?
Would you recommend relying on:
How would you proceed in this situation:
Keep campaigns paused until tracking is 100% verified?
Or cautiously restart with limited budget?
Any advice, debugging frameworks, or tools I should look into would be hugely appreciated.
Thanks a lot!