The ads say you are winning. The diary says otherwise.

A conversion is a rule, not a job

In Google Ads, a conversion fires when something you (or your agency) chose has happened. That something might be a sale, a form that was actually sent, a call that lasted over a minute, or merely a tap on a phone number. The column in the report looks the same either way.

If the rule is 'someone tapped the number', the account can look busy on days when nobody booked. The person may have hung up, been outside your area, or been pricing five other firms. The ads system does not know. It only knows the tap.

See what the account is learning from

Google uses some conversion actions as the main goal, often called primary. It leans on those when it decides who to show the ad to. If the primary action is easy to trigger and weakly tied to money, the spend drifts towards more of those easy triggers.

In the account, open Goals or Conversions and write down each primary action in plain words: 'tap to call', 'form sent', 'thank-you page', 'purchase'. Then ask one question of each: if this fires, have we usually been paid, or only contacted?

• If you cannot open the account, send the access note in is your agency delivering?. Do this before you raise the budget.
• Ask which actions are primary, and which of those are real jobs or sales rather than taps and page views.
• Ask whether anyone checks that a counted lead became work. A simple sheet is enough: date, source, became a job, yes or no.

Look at the searches you paid for

The search terms report lists the actual words people typed, not the themes you think you bought. This is where a modest daily budget quietly leaves town: a roofer paying for jobs in another city, a garage paying for parts rather than repairs, a shop paying for people who wanted a free download.

AuditCrow does not pull that list. You, or the person with access, need to open it in Google Ads. While you are there, ask whether the campaigns are limited to people physically in your area. Ads can be set to reach people who are merely interested in a place, which is a different and often more expensive audience.

Then look at the page the ad lands on

A honest conversion setup still fails if the page is slow, the number is not tappable, or the form does not say what happens next. That part you can check without the ads login. Open the landing page on a phone.

• Can you call or send the form without hunting?
• Does the page say what you do and where you work, in the first screen?
• If you publish prices or a 'from' price, is it on the page? If you do not, is there another reason to trust you: reviews, photos of real jobs, a physical place?
• Send a test form to yourself. If it never arrives, every ad above it is a guess.

What to ask for next

If the account optimises to taps, ask whether real jobs can be sent back into Google Ads so it learns from paid work. That is a setup job for whoever runs the account. It is not something the website scan does for you. Until it exists, keep the sheet, and judge the agency on jobs booked, not on the conversion column.