Conversion tracking, done properly

Count the thing that makes you money

A conversion should be an event that correlates with revenue. A form submission, a phone call over thirty seconds, a booking. Not a page view, not a click on the contact page, not time on site.

The platforms optimise toward whatever you define, so a badly chosen conversion actively steers your budget toward the wrong people.

Phone calls are usually the gap

In most trades the majority of enquiries are calls, and calls are usually untracked. That means the optimisation is learning from half the data and the half it can see is unrepresentative.

Tracked calls, even crudely, change what the platform learns. This is the most common single improvement available to a trades ad account.

• —Form submissions — the easy one, usually already working
• —Phone calls over a threshold length — the one most people miss
• —WhatsApp and Messenger conversations started
• —Bookings or quote requests, where they exist
• —Not: page views, scroll depth, time on site, contact page visits

Value, not just count

If you can attach a value to conversions — even a rough average — the platforms can optimise toward revenue rather than volume. A business where some jobs are worth €200 and others €8,000 is badly served by counting both as one conversion.

An estimated value is far better than none. It does not need to be exact to be useful.

Make it survive a website change

The most common way tracking breaks is a website update that removes the tag. Nobody notices for a month, the campaign appears to collapse, and the cause is invisible.

Check after every site change. Submit your own form and confirm it registers. Put a reminder in the calendar if that is what it takes.

Do not optimise on tiny numbers

A campaign producing eight conversions a month does not have enough data for the platform to learn from, and switching optimisation targets weekly guarantees it never will.

Below roughly thirty conversions a month, optimise toward a more common upstream event — a landing page reached, a call button tapped — and judge the account on the real outcome manually.