The monthly report says the ads produced conversions. The orders that pay the bills sit exactly where they were a year ago.
Before looking at the creative or the budget, check what the account is being told to optimize toward. In accounts with this pattern, the website never sent a real sale value, so Google spends the budget winning the wrong sale.
Here is how it happens, how to check your own account in about five minutes, and what to fix first.
Google buys what you tell it to count
Smart Bidding is an auction strategy, not a judgment. It does what the conversion data tells it to do, and the conversion data comes from your own website.
Two of the strategies are counting strategies. Maximize conversions and Target CPA chase the number of conversions, so every conversion is worth the same to the algorithm. The other two are value strategies. Maximize conversion value and Target ROAS chase revenue, which means they need to know what each sale was actually worth.
Google is explicit about it. The documentation for Maximize conversion value says: "Before you can use Maximize conversion value bidding, you'll also need to set up conversion tracking with transaction-specific values" (Google Ads Help).
Transaction-specific is the part that gets skipped.
The three ways the value goes wrong
| What the website sends | What Google does with it |
|---|---|
| No value at all | The strategy can only count conversions. A form fill, a parts order, and a machine sale weigh the same. |
| One flat value on every order | Worse than nothing, because the reports look complete. Every sale appears to be worth the same fixed amount. |
| The real transaction total | Bidding can work toward revenue, and expensive clicks that lead to expensive orders become worth winning. |
The middle row is the one that hides. A flat value produces a tidy conversion-value column that rises every month, so nobody questions it. Meanwhile the algorithm has been told that a $40 accessory order and a $2,500 machine order are identical, and cheap orders are far easier to win. The budget flows to the cheapest thing in the catalog, month after month, exactly as instructed.
The pattern on the sales side is recognizable: accessories and spare parts move steadily, the high-margin products barely move, and the ad report looks healthy throughout.
Check your own account in five minutes
You do not need an agency to find this. You need two screens.
1. The conversion value column in Google Ads. Open Campaigns, then look at Conversions and Conv. value side by side. Divide the value by the conversions. If the result is a round number that barely changes month to month, the value is not coming from real transactions. If the value column is empty or zero while conversions are counting, nothing is being sent at all.
2. The purchase event in Google Analytics 4. In GA4, open Reports, then Monetization, then Ecommerce purchases. Compare total revenue there against what your store's own order report says for the same dates. Those two numbers will rarely match to the cent, and they should be close. If GA4 shows a suspiciously round total, or a small fraction of real revenue, the purchase event is not passing a value parameter correctly. Google's ecommerce documentation covers what the event should carry (Google Analytics developer docs).
3. The link between them. In Google Ads, check which conversion action is being used for bidding. It should be the one fed by that purchase event, and it should use the transaction value rather than a fixed amount. One account can carry several conversion actions, and only some of them are included in bidding.
If all three look right, the tracking is not your problem and you can spend your attention elsewhere. If any of them looks wrong, stop reading the performance reports. They have been measuring the wrong thing for as long as the setup has been in place.
What it costs while it is wrong
Nothing dramatic happens. That is what makes it expensive.
The account keeps running. The conversion count stays respectable. The budget goes out every month and comes back as orders that were never the reason you advertised. A store selling both a low-cost consumable and a high-cost product can run this way for years. The report never shows a failure, only a product mix nobody looks at closely.
Two consequences are worth naming. The first is the spend itself, buying clicks against a target that does not match the business. The second is slower and more damaging: every optimization decision made on top of that data is also wrong. Budgets get shifted toward campaigns that look efficient, keywords get paused for poor conversion rates, and all of it is reasoning from a number that was never true.
What to fix, in order
- Fix the value before touching bids or budgets. A change made against bad data cannot be judged. You will not know whether the result came from the change or from the measurement.
- Spend less while it is wrong. This is the opposite of what most accounts hear, and it is the honest answer. Money spent bidding against a broken target is not an investment in learning.
- Send the real transaction total, from the store to GA4 and through to the Google Ads conversion action used for bidding.
- Re-check the two numbers a week later. Conversion value divided by conversions should now look like your actual average order value, with the variation a real business has.
- Only then put the budget back up, and judge the campaigns on what they return rather than how many orders they counted.
Common questions
Does this affect Performance Max too?
Yes, and more so. Performance Max leans heavily on the conversion data it is given, across more surfaces than Search alone. A flat or missing value has a wider blast radius there.
Our store is on Wix, or Shopify, or WooCommerce. Does the platform matter?
Not for the diagnosis. Every mainstream platform can send a real transaction value, and every one of them can be set up badly. The buttons differ, the failure does not.
We only generate leads, we do not sell online. Is this relevant?
Partly. Without transactions there is no order value to send, so counting strategies are a reasonable default. The equivalent trap is treating every lead as identical when a quote request and a newsletter signup are both firing the same conversion action.
How long does the fix take?
The measurement work is usually days, not weeks. Recovering the bidding takes longer, because the strategy needs new data before its behavior changes.
Why do my Google Ads show conversions but no sales?
Usually because the website sends the same value with every conversion, or no value at all. Smart Bidding optimizes toward whatever it is told to count, so if every order looks equally valuable, the budget buys the orders that are cheapest to win. The conversion count rises while revenue stays flat.
How do I check whether my Google Ads conversion values are real?
Divide the Conv. value column by the Conversions column in Google Ads. If the result is a round number that barely changes month to month, the value is not coming from real transactions. Then compare GA4 ecommerce revenue against your store's own order report for the same dates.
Does Maximize conversion value bidding require transaction values?
Yes. Google's documentation states that before using Maximize conversion value bidding you need conversion tracking set up with transaction-specific values. Without them the strategy has no way to tell a large order from a small one.
Should I pause Google Ads while conversion tracking is broken?
Reducing spend is usually the right call rather than pausing entirely. Money spent bidding against a broken target buys clicks against the wrong goal, and any optimization made on that data is also unreliable. Fix the value first, then raise the budget once the numbers reflect real orders.
If you are not sure which of the three cases your account is in, that is exactly what the $297 Website & Growth Audit is for. We read the ad account, the analytics property, and Search Console together. You get back what is being measured, what is being measured wrong, and what it has been costing. The ongoing version of the work is our Google Ads and Analytics tracking service.
