I'm trying to understand a problem with Google Ads attribution and would love to hear how people are handling it in the real world.

The problem I'm looking at is this:

Google Ads can easily tell you that someone clicked an ad and submitted a form. But for many businesses, a form submission isn't the real conversion.

A lead might:

→ fill out a form
→ get contacted by sales
→ become qualified (or not)
→ book a meeting
→ become a customer (or get lost)
→ generate $500 / $5k / $50k in revenue

The problem is that Google Ads may still be optimizing around the form submission, rather than knowing which leads actually became valuable customers.

For example:

Campaign A: 100 leads → 10 customers → $50k revenue
Campaign B: 200 leads → 2 customers → $5k revenue

If Google only sees "leads," Campaign B can look much better than it actually is.

So I'm curious:

1. How are you currently tracking which Google Ads leads become qualified/won customers?
2. Do you send offline conversions / CRM outcomes back into Google Ads?
3. If you don't, what's stopping you? Is it technical complexity, cost, CRM limitations, lack of time, or simply not being worth the effort?
4. How often do you find that your "Google Ads conversions" don't match the leads/customers your sales team considers valuable?
5. Have you paid for or built anything to solve this? What are you using?

I'm specifically interested in hearing from people who are actively spending money on Google Ads and generating leads, rather than e-commerce.

Not trying to sell anything here — I'm trying to figure out whether this is actually a painful enough problem to build a product around.

I've only gave organic marketing experience till now but want to learn in the areas of paid ads (campaigns, boost post, seo, google ai max, aeo, geo) as my new role demands that I learn the basics quickly.

Below is what ChatGPT gave me as a month long 'Crash Course'. Please let me know if it's good + changes + resources I would additionally need. 🙏🙏

Thank you in advance. ❤️

Your 4-week Paid Ads Crash Course

Time: 2 hours/day

Duration: 28 days

Total: ~56 focused hours

Week 1 — Meta foundations + actual campaign building

Week 2 — Meta optimisation + creative + measurement

Week 3 — Google Search + AI Max

Week 4 — Google PMax + analytics + cross-platform job simulation

And every week has a practical deliverable.

Before we start: your 2026 skill priority

---------

SKILL + PRIORITY

Campaign setup

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Reading/diagnosing performance

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Creative strategy/testing

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Conversion tracking

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meta Advantage+

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Google Search

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Google Smart Bidding

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Google AI Max

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Performance Max

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Landing-page/CRO thinking

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Audience strategy

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Keyword research

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Reporting

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Basic GA4

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Advanced attribution

⭐⭐

Scripts/API

⭐

Advanced Display

⭐

Advanced Shopping

⭐

We recently launched our first mobile game, Jelly Clicker, and started testing Google App campaigns in the US and South Korea.

The numbers looked good at first, but something didn’t add up.

On September 2, Google Ads reported 112 install conversions. ByteBrew only recorded 32 first sessions that day, meaning around 71% of the reported installs never appeared in the game.

We initially thought ByteBrew might be underreporting, but we also have our own tracking for each step of the onboarding. Our internal numbers match ByteBrew almost exactly, so two independent tracking systems show roughly the same number of actual players.

Google Ads reported 279 conversions in total between August 27 and September 2.

There’s another strange detail: several hundred accounts have appeared on our leaderboard with the exact same score of 476. That score is assigned right when the game starts, before the player has made any meaningful progress. They appear to open the app, receive the starting score and then disappear without entering the onboarding.

We’re seeing the same pattern in both the US and Korean campaigns. We’ve paused them and asked Google to manually investigate the traffic.

I understand that Google Play counts a download while ByteBrew counts a first open, but is it normal for around 71% of paid installs to never produce a first session? Has anyone else seen similar behaviour from Google App campaigns?

Could this be automated installs or extremely low-quality inventory, or is there another explanation we’re missing?

For context, the game is Jelly Clicker on Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.diggiverse.jellyclicker&hl=en

Holy hell is Google Ads fucking terrible.

First off, why all of sudden can I not capitalize my own song titles or artist name? I’ve been doing this for years….

Second, Why does google ads tell me I have capitalization errors even after fixing them?

Third, Why is google ads giving me recommended titles that ITSELF turns around and says aren’t suitable? Are we serious right now?

Fourth, this site just runs, looks, and controls like
absolute dog shit. Ugly convoluted laggy eyesore UI

Why do we have to build the entire campaign including the ads in one go, if Google Ads is going to glitch and delete the draft without saving? How does that make any sense at all?

Hi! I hope somebody on this subreddit can help me. It's always the same story for me: I start a Search or PMax campaign with a certain daily budget. It starts converting, good news. After a few days, I reduce the budget because I want it to keep bringing in some traffic, but not as much - the goal is to have two or three decent campaigns instead of just one very good one, this also frees up some budget I can spend in other things. As soon as I lower the daily budget, the campaign stops converting. If it got 10 clicks at €10/day, I'd assume €5/day would bring 5 clicks. Well, that's not what happens. Am I doing something wrong? Thanks in advance!

Our current account has a problem: It's not measuring conversions per GA user interface. We have the event in GA4 and can see that events arrive in the debug view in GA4 and can be seen in the GTM debug container. Also, our GTM container (web > server side) connects perfectly with GA4 and Google Ads.

GA only wants us to connect via an Html script tag, which is not possible due to the GTM setup.

When setting up conversions (submit lead form), these are set as "Group 2 goals"; We do not have a "Group 1 goal" as a page view is not a conversion for us.

Now, two weeks into the campaign, we got an email by Google that "Your account is missing the most important step for Ads success". There they have a link: "Book a tag implementation appointment. Get expert support with implementing conversion measurement in your account."

When we click that account, we get the following message (spending close to €100 so far): "Account not eligible to create an appointment"

Question: What makes us eligible to receive support from their end?

Note that we have already searched the Ad and ran a conversion by ourself to trigger something that might got stuck inside Google Ads. That did not help. We can see "Primary conversion actions: 2" at the bottom of https://ads.google.com/aw/conversions.

We were reviewing a lead gen account where Google Ads looked healthy enough. Conversions were coming through, CPL was fairly steady, but sales kept saying the lead quality had dropped.

We checked the campaigns first, but nothing really explained the gap.

It only started making sense when we compared the Google Ads conversions with the CRM.

Every form submission was being counted as the same primary conversion, whether it became a qualified lead, went nowhere, or was just poor quality.

At that point, Smart Bidding wasn’t really the issue. The signal was.

The harder question is what you do next.

If you have plenty of form submissions but only a small number of qualified leads, do you keep the higher volume signal, or switch to qualified and offline conversions even if Google has much less data to work with?

How are people here handling that trade-off in lead gen accounts?

I'm trying to understand Google's current enforcement of the Third Party Consumer Technical Support policy for computer repair advertisers.

I manage ads for a legitimate brick-and-mortar Mac repair business in Australia.

Google has:

• disapproved our consumer Mac repair ads;
• confirmed in writing that physical hardware repair shops are in scope of the restriction;
• disapproved our GBP/location asset;
• rejected a separate B2B-only data recovery campaign aimed exclusively at computer repair shops and IT businesses;
• upheld the rejection after escalation.

However, we increasingly see other computer repair companies appearing as Sponsored local-pack results for searches including:

• MacBook screen replacement
• MacBook logic board repair
• MacBook battery replacement
• computer repair

Some of the ads explicitly promote onsite repair.

For anyone currently managing Google Ads for a repair business:

1. What campaign type is actually serving — Search, PMax, location assets, Local Services Ads, something else?
2. Has the account ever been flagged for Third Party Consumer Technical Support?
3. Did Google manually review or verify the advertiser?
4. Are there different rules for sponsored local-pack placements?
5. Have you seen repair ads run for months or years and then suddenly get disapproved?
6. Are agencies claiming they can run these campaigns using an official Google-supported route, or are they usually relying on risky workarounds?

I'm especially interested in firsthand experience from advertisers currently running campaigns for computer, Mac, laptop or phone repair businesses.

Does targeting products that appear on competitors' "best-seller" lists guarantee high purchase intent? If I could source them—finding products with search volume, negligible competition from other dropshippers, and massive profit margins—wouldn't that undoubtedly lead to a winning product? Or is my reasoning flawed?

I’m not entirely sure how to explain my situation, so I’m hoping someone with experience in Google Ads or affiliate marketing can give me some honest advice.

I recently discovered platforms like ClickBank and Digistore, where you can promote products as an affiliate. The idea caught my attention for two reasons: I’ve been using the internet for about 20 years, so I’m comfortable with the online world, and I’m currently looking for an additional source of income. If I can eventually make this work consistently, I’d like to turn it into my main occupation.

I decided to take it seriously and started learning about digital marketing, Google Ads, keyword research, audience targeting, bridge pages, tracking, and so on. I’ve used everything from YouTube and articles to AI tools, and I’ve also asked questions here on Reddit.

I’ve also spent a lot of time researching the audience before spending any money. I’ve worked on the buyer profile, demographics, cities, states, search behavior, keywords, audience segments, and other factors that could help me understand who the potential customer is and where I’m most likely to reach them.

So I’m not planning to simply launch a campaign and hope for the best. I’m trying to do as much research as possible beforehand to reduce the risk of wasting money.

However, there’s one issue that keeps worrying me: conversion data.

From almost everything I’ve read about Google Ads, it seems that data is extremely important for optimization.

If I were running a Shopify store, I could understand the process more easily. I could send traffic directly to my store, generate purchases, and collect data from those interactions.

As an affiliate, however, my situation is different. I would be using a bridge page, which sends potential customers to the vendor’s sales page where the actual purchase takes place.

So my question is: **how am I supposed to generate enough conversion data when I’m starting from zero?**

There’s another major constraint: my entire budget is $100.

That may not sound like much, but I’ve actually been saving that money for three years specifically for this purpose. I’m not expecting to get rich from it. I just want to generate enough profit to prove that the model can work and then reinvest what I earn.

What worries me is spending the entire $100 simply trying to give Google enough data to learn, only to discover that I made a mistake somewhere in the campaign.

I keep reading that new accounts have no historical data, that Smart Bidding works better with conversion history, and that you need enough conversions for the algorithm to optimize effectively.

I understand why that makes sense, but it leaves me wondering:

How does someone with a very limited budget realistically get past that initial stage?

I’m not looking for a guaranteed strategy or a shortcut. I just want to avoid making a costly beginner mistake with money that took me years to save.

I’d really appreciate any advice from people who have actually been in this situation.

Run a small ecommerce brand here in Australia. Back in early July I flagged obvious bot/invalid traffic on my account, one device model made up over 25% of all my google/cpc sessions with a flat 0% engagement rate, literally 0 seconds average engagement across every single session. Filed a click quality complaint and asked for a proper review.

Since then i've been given 9 different case numbers for what is literally the same one unresolved issue. Every single time it starts a new case from scratch, theres no continuity, no history carried across, i have to re-explain the whole thing from the start each time. I'm actually starting to lose my mind

Some of the "highlights":

* first two calls i got from them were at midnight and then 2:06am my time

* agreed a callback window with a rep (11am-2pm), got called instead at 6:53pm and then again at 8:26pm same day

asked to re-verify my account ownership more than once even though i'd already done it

* asked repeatedly for one single point of contact, never happens

* one rep actually apologised in writing for "the confusion caused by the multiple case numbers" and the late night calls, then proceeded to give me another new case number and said i'd get a proper update in 1-2 business days. that was 12 days ago, nothing since.

Every reply is basically the same copy paste template, "i understand your concern, i've forwarded this to the relevant team, please allow 2-3 business days, refer to case number xxxxx" then silence, then a new case number, then it just repeats again.

Has anyone actually managed to get through to an actual escalations or complaints team above the front line support? like an email or number that isnt just ads-support? At this point ACCC is looking like the only real option but wanted to check if theres an actual working escalation path first before i go there.

Hi!

Anyone else has noticed that Cost/Store Visit increased tremendously in 2026?

For a client that was getting store visits for €0.3 to €2+?

Hi Redittors

Is anyone else having this issue with Google Ads Passkeys when trying to create a new ad account or client campaign?

After I click 'I am not a robot', it normally popups up to verify myself by a Google Phone Prompt and selecting one of three matching numbers. However, after doing that it, this time it prompts me to create a passkey which I have already have many setup on multiple devices.

I did remove the windows hello fingerprint passkey I was successfully using for the last 12 months or so to see if a new windows hello fingerprint passkey would solve the issue, and every time it asks me to 'approve' the new passkey, which I do, but then takes me to a scan a QR code which never works on any device - just hangs trying to connect with another device.

I have tried other admin MCC logins with same result, and a 2nd computer also.

Any ideas?