The Revenue Your Ads Account Is Making Up

Most owners who check their tracking check whether the bookings are counted. Far fewer check whether the dollar figure next to them is real. The count and the value are two different measurements, and in our experience the value is wrong far more often.

This matters more than it sounds, because the value is what you judge the account on. If the revenue is inflated, your return looks better than it is, and you keep spending on keywords that are actually losing money.

Fault one: the hardcoded price

Our BLS thank-you page reported a fixed amount on every sale. Not the amount collected, a number typed into the page when it was built. Every BLS booking, whatever the customer actually paid, reported the same figure to Google.

That is fine for exactly as long as one price exists. Then you add a HeartCode version at a lower price, or run a promotion, or a discount code goes out in a recovery email, and the page keeps confidently reporting the original number. We had a sale come through at seventy nine dollars that reported as eighty nine.

Ten dollars sounds trivial. It is not the ten dollars. It is that the number has stopped being a measurement. Once the page reports a constant, your revenue figure is just your conversion count multiplied by an assumption, and you cannot tell a cheap booking from an expensive one anywhere in the account.

A hardcoded value does not report your revenue. It reports your conversion count wearing a dollar sign.

Fault two: several conversions for one sale

The second fault is quieter. Over time an account accumulates conversion actions: one from the website tag, one from an analytics import, one from a server-side upload added later when someone was fixing attribution. Each is set as a primary action, because each seemed important when it was created.

Now one purchase can trigger more than one of them. The count doubles, the value doubles, and nothing anywhere says this is the same sale twice. We found three primary purchase actions live on our own account at the same time.

The tell is a return that looks too good next to your bank account. If the ads dashboard says one number and the payment processor says materially less, believe the processor. It is the only one of the two that had to actually collect the money.

How to check yours

1. 01Open your conversion actions and count how many are set to Primary and are purchases. If it is more than one, work out whether a single sale can fire two of them.
2. 02Look at the value setting on each. If it says to use the same value for every conversion, your revenue figure is an assumption, not a measurement.
3. 03Read your thank-you page source and find the number being sent. If it is a literal amount rather than something read from the order, it is hardcoded.
4. 04Pick one real week. Add up what your payment processor actually collected from ad-driven bookings and compare it to what the ads account reported for the same week. These will never match perfectly, but they should be close, and which way they differ tells you which fault you have.

Step four is the one worth doing even if you skip the rest. Every other check tells you how the plumbing is configured. That one tells you whether the plumbing is lying.

What good looks like

The value sent should be the amount actually charged, read from the order rather than typed into the page. One purchase action should be primary, and it should be the one closest to the money. Every conversion should carry a transaction id so a repeat page load cannot be counted twice.

None of that makes your reported revenue perfect. Some bookings will always go untracked. But it does mean that when the number moves, something real moved, which is the entire point of measuring anything.