About us and our services
How do you work out what my ads actually returned?
The short answer
From your jobs, not from the platform's conversion count. Calls and forms are tracked and listened to, you tell us which became work and what it was worth, and each kind of inquiry gets a dollar value from that history. Those values are written back into Google Ads so the bidding aims at money rather than at map taps, and the return you see in your dashboard is built from the same figures, reported in profit rather than revenue.
Why the platform's own number is not an answer
Google counts a great many things as a conversion: a purchase, but also a tap on your business listing, a request for directions, a video view, a tap on a phone number that may never have connected. They all land in one column. In one month from a roofing account we manage, that column held 735 entries, of which 23 were a person actually getting in touch. Nothing about that is fraud. It is how the platform reports, and if nobody separates the two, the monthly report looks like a triumph.
Where the values come from
Each thing the platform counts is weighted by how often it turns into a real inquiry in your account, and each real inquiry is valued from what a finished job is worth to you. In the same roofing account a website form came out worth about $998 and a listing tap about $272, because that is what the account's own history said. A generic playbook would have guessed differently.
Until we have your margin, the figure is labeled estimated. Once you tell us what jobs closed and for how much, it becomes measured, and the label changes.
How long it takes
Tracking goes in during week one. Values arrive during the first month as real inquiries do. Somewhere in months two to four the bidding is switched to chase those values, and from then on the return figure is something Google acts on rather than something we report. We would rather say that now than in week two.