On paper, the account looked healthy. Click-through rate near 14%. A reported conversion rate above 10%. Cost per conversion under $30. Numbers like that get invoices approved and budgets renewed.
The account belonged to a senior living community in northern Arizona, and almost none of those numbers meant what they appeared to mean.
The demand was real. The aim was not.
When we audited the account, more than $10,000 in historical spend told a consistent story — three leaks, each quietly inflating the scoreboard.
First, the ads were buying people who had already found the community. Performance Max was consuming most of the budget, and the majority of its visible search spend was landing on the community's own brand name. Thousands of dollars had gone to clicks from people who typed the community's name into Google — people who were coming anyway.
Second, the conversion tag was counting the wrong phone calls. The single biggest source of reported conversions was the call button. But this is a senior living community: a large share of inbound calls are families of current residents phoning the front desk. Every one of those service calls was recorded as a marketing conversion. The dashboard called them leads. The front desk called them Tuesday.
Third, the ads were serving hundreds of miles out of area — including on searches for a similarly named community center that isn't a senior living community at all. Meanwhile, the highest-value service the community offers had zero keyword coverage. Not underfunded. Zero.
Put those together and the "10% conversion rate" dissolves. The real cost of a genuine new-family inquiry was materially worse than the reported number — and the account had no way to know it, because the tracking underneath turned out to be an empty shell: base tags installed, no event logic behind them.
What the rebuild looked like
We paused Performance Max and the legacy campaigns, removed the brand name from paid entirely, rebuilt conversion tracking from zero across Google, Microsoft, and GA4, locked geography to the actual service area, built a negative keyword list over a hundred terms deep from the audit data, and gave the highest-value service its own campaign coverage for the first time. Reported conversions will look smaller for a while — because they'll finally be real.
Three questions to ask of your own account
What exactly fires your conversion tag — and who is on the other end of it? If a phone-call conversion can be triggered by an existing customer, a vendor, or a wrong number, your CPA is fiction.
How much of your paid traffic already knew your name? Pull your search terms and separate brand from non-brand. Paying ad rates to intercept your own customers is the most common leak we find.
Where are your impressions actually serving? Geography reports surprise almost everyone. Distance-based waste doesn't announce itself; you have to go look.
An ad account that reports good news isn't the same as an ad account that's working. If yours has never had those three questions asked of it, that's what our audits are for.