Your conversions are worth zero, and nobody told you

Your Google Ads account might be tracking conversions perfectly. Forms are firing. Phone calls are appearing. Purchases are coming through. Then you look at the conversion value column. £0. Or perhaps every lead is worth £1. If you are asking Google to optimise towards value, that is a much bigger problem than it looks.

Google cannot see your bank account

This is probably the easiest way to understand conversion values. Google Ads knows what happens inside the advertising system. It knows:

• What somebody searched
• Which advert they clicked
• Which device they used
• Where they were
• Whether your conversion tag fired
• Which audiences they belonged to
• How much the click cost

What Google does not automatically know is whether that person eventually became a £20,000 customer or wasted 45 minutes of your salesperson's time. Unless you feed that information back.

That difference becomes increasingly important as more advertisers rely on automated bidding. You are essentially telling Google:

Here is what happened. Now go and find me more people like this.

If the information you provide is poor, Google can become extremely efficient at producing the wrong outcome.

Google Ads cannot optimise towards the economics of your business if those economics never make it into Google Ads.

What conversion value actually means

Conversion value is simply a numerical representation of how valuable a conversion is to your business.

For ecommerce, this is usually easy. Someone spends £243, so the conversion value is £243. Someone else spends £61, so the conversion value is £61. Google can now distinguish between those two transactions.

Lead generation is more complicated. Imagine your website generates two enquiries.

Lead A

Needs a £500 service. Low margin. Small chance of becoming a customer.

Lead B

Needs a £15,000 service. High margin. Strong chance of becoming a customer.

If both conversions are simply recorded as a lead submitted, Google may initially treat them as the same outcome. Commercially, they are completely different.

Conversion values are one way of teaching Google that difference.

The £0 conversion problem

This is surprisingly common. A company has conversion tracking installed. Leads appear correctly. Campaigns are generating conversions. Everything looks fine.

But nobody ever configured a meaningful conversion value, so every enquiry is recorded with no value at all.

If you are running a conversion-volume strategy such as Maximise Conversions or Target CPA, Google can still optimise towards getting more conversions. But it cannot use £0 conversions to understand which conversions are financially more valuable.

And if you want to use value-based bidding, such as Maximise Conversion Value or Target ROAS, that becomes a fundamental problem. You are effectively telling Google:

Conversion A = £0. Conversion B = £0. Conversion C = £0. Now maximise the value.

There is no useful value distinction to optimise. The tracking may technically be working. The commercial signal is not.

Conversion volume and conversion value are not the same thing

This distinction matters. Imagine two campaigns.

If you optimise purely towards conversion volume, Campaign A looks better. It generated more leads at a lower CPL. Now connect the CRM.

Completely different story. Campaign B has the higher CPL. It is also producing more than four times the revenue.

This is one of the biggest problems with judging lead generation campaigns purely on cost per lead. Cheap leads are not automatically good leads. Expensive leads are not automatically bad leads. What matters is what happens afterwards.

Why giving every lead the same value causes problems

Sometimes the conversion value is not £0. It is £1. Every submitted form gets assigned the same value simply because somebody was told that Google Ads needs a value.

This is slightly better for reporting. It is not necessarily better for optimisation. If every conversion is worth exactly the same amount, the value does not actually tell Google anything new.

Imagine your account records:

• Newsletter signup = £1
• Contact form = £1
• Phone call = £1
• Quote request = £1
• Qualified lead = £1

Google sees five equal outcomes. Your sales team probably does not. A quote request from somebody actively looking to spend £20,000 is obviously not commercially equivalent to somebody joining your newsletter. Yet your account is telling the bidding system that it is.

This becomes especially dangerous if all those actions are being used as primary conversion goals, because primary actions are the ones bidding uses. Google's documentation on primary and secondary conversion actions sets out the difference. Google may discover that newsletter signups are much easier to generate, and you have just given it permission to chase them.

Google did not make a bad decision. It followed your instructions.

How to calculate what a lead is actually worth

You do not need perfect data to start improving this. For lead generation, a simple expected-value model can be extremely useful. Imagine:

• Average customer revenue = £5,000
• Gross margin = 40%
• Lead-to-sale rate = 10%

That means an average customer produces £5,000 × 40%, or £2,000 in gross profit. And one in ten leads becomes a customer. So the expected gross-profit value of each lead is:

£2,000 × 10% = £200 per lead

You could therefore reasonably estimate that an average lead is worth around £200 in expected gross profit.

Whether you use revenue, profit or another commercial metric depends on the business. The important part is consistency. You are trying to give Google a signal that represents what you actually care about, not create an accounting system.

Different leads should have different values

This is where value-based optimisation becomes much more useful. Suppose you are a finance company offering three products.

If you assign every enquiry a value of £1, Google cannot distinguish between them. If you feed the actual differences back, it can start identifying the types of searches, users, locations, devices and other signals associated with more valuable outcomes.

Instead of asking where you can find the most leads, you begin asking where you can find the most valuable business. That is a much better question.

The best value often appears after the lead happens

For lead generation companies, the biggest limitation is obvious. When someone fills in your form, you usually do not know what they are worth yet. They might become:

• Uncontactable
• Unqualified
• A booked appointment
• A sales opportunity
• A customer
• A £50,000 customer

That information develops over time. This is why connecting your CRM data back into Google Ads can be so powerful.

Instead of stopping tracking at the form submission, you can feed back later stages such as qualified lead, sales opportunity and customer, and potentially the actual value of the sale.

Your optimisation signal becomes considerably closer to the thing the business actually wants.

Form submissions are rarely the real conversion

This is something I come across constantly when auditing lead generation accounts. Google Ads reports 250 conversions. Everyone is happy. Then you ask what those conversions actually are. They include:

• 110 form submissions
• 45 calls
• 32 WhatsApp clicks
• 28 contact-page visits
• 19 live-chat starts
• 16 brochure downloads

Suddenly the 250 conversions are not nearly as impressive. Only some of those actions represent actual enquiries. And even the enquiries are not necessarily customers.

The farther your bidding signal sits from revenue, the easier it becomes for Google to optimise towards something that looks good in the advertising platform but does very little for the business.

Your primary conversion should be as close to revenue as your tracking allows.

Why offline conversion tracking changes everything

Imagine you generate leads for solicitors. Google Ads produces:

Keyword A

40 leads at £50 each.

Keyword B

20 leads at £80 each.

Based purely on CPL, Keyword A wins. Now your CRM shows that Keyword A generated one client and Keyword B generated seven. Your bidding system never knew, because nobody sent that information back.

Offline conversion imports allow you to connect what happens after the enquiry with the original advertising interaction. That can include events such as:

• Lead qualified
• Consultation booked
• Application approved
• Deal won
• Policy sold
• Loan completed
• Contract signed
• Revenue generated

This closes the information gap between Google Ads and the sales team. Instead of Google learning from whoever fills in your form, it can begin learning from the people who actually turn into customers. That is a far more valuable dataset.

If capturing and storing click IDs is not practical for your setup, enhanced conversions for leads is often a simpler route to the same outcome.

The danger of micro conversions

Micro conversions have their place. Tracking actions such as video views, form starts, pricing-page visits, brochure downloads, add to basket and live-chat interactions can help you understand user behaviour.

The mistake is treating all of them as bidding goals. There is a difference between something you want to measure and something you want Google to optimise towards. Your account does not need every interesting action to be a primary conversion.

If somebody visits your pricing page, that is useful information. But if Google can generate thousands of pricing-page visits cheaply while actual enquiries remain expensive, what do you think an automated system will gravitate towards if both are treated as equal goals?

The easier action. Again, Google is simply doing what you asked.

Your £1 test conversion may still be running three years later

This sounds ridiculous. It happens.

Someone sets up conversion tracking during an account migration. They assign £1 to a lead because the real value is not available yet. The plan is to fix it later. Nobody does.

Three years pass. Campaign structures change. Different agencies work on the account. Smart Bidding gets introduced. Performance Max launches. Target ROAS gets tested. And every lead is still worth £1.

The account becomes increasingly sophisticated. The underlying data remains rubbish.

This is why conversion tracking should be audited regularly rather than treated as a one-time technical job. It is one of the first things we look at in any PPC management handover.

When fixed conversion values can still work

Not every lead generation company can feed dynamic revenue back into Google. That does not mean conversion values are useless. You can assign estimated values based on historical performance. For example:

These values do not need to be perfect on day one. They need to reflect the relative importance of each action.

If a qualified lead historically produces four times more commercial value than an ordinary enquiry, giving it roughly four times the conversion value is already providing the system with more useful information. You can refine it as the data improves.

Be careful with made-up values

There is a difference between an estimated value and an invented one. Suppose somebody decides that a contact form is worth £100, a phone call £500 and a newsletter signup £20. Why those numbers?

If there is no commercial logic behind them, you may simply be replacing missing data with misleading data. That can be worse.

Your values should ideally come from things like:

• Average order value
• Average customer revenue
• Gross margin
• Lead-to-sale rate
• Qualification rate
• Product mix
• Customer lifetime value
• Historical CRM data

The numbers do not have to be perfect. They should be defensible.

Value does not always mean revenue

One mistake is assuming conversion values must exactly equal the amount of money a customer paid. They do not. The purpose is to communicate relative business value.

For ecommerce, revenue is usually an obvious starting point. For lead generation, expected value often makes more sense. For subscription businesses, you may use estimated lifetime value. For businesses with very different margins, gross profit may be more useful than revenue.

Imagine:

Product A

Revenue £1,000. Profit £100.

Product B

Revenue £700. Profit £350.

If you optimise purely towards revenue, Product A appears more valuable. If the business cares about profit, Product B is clearly better.

Your conversion values should represent the outcome you actually want Google to prioritise.

Do not switch to Target ROAS just because values exist

Adding conversion values does not automatically mean Target ROAS is the right bidding strategy. You still need enough reliable data.

Your values need to be accurate enough to trust. The campaign needs enough conversion activity for the algorithm to learn. And your ROAS target needs to make commercial sense.

Otherwise you can end up giving Google a very strict target based on weak data, and choking campaign volume in the process.

First improve the data. Then decide how aggressively you want Google to optimise against it. Do not solve a tracking problem by adding another layer of automation.

The conversion value audit

If I inherited a Google Ads account tomorrow, this is roughly how I would investigate the conversion setup.

1. Open every conversion action

Go into Goals, then Conversions, and look at every action currently being recorded. Do not just check whether conversions are firing. Find out what they actually mean.

2. Check what is primary

This is critical, because primary conversion actions can be used for campaign bidding. For each one, ask:

• Do I genuinely want Google trying to generate more of this action?

If the answer is no, question why it is primary.

3. Check the value

Look for:

• £0 values
• £1 placeholder values
• Old values nobody remembers setting
• The same value across completely different actions
• Revenue values that do not match actual transactions

Any of these deserve investigation.

4. Check whether values are static or dynamic

For ecommerce businesses, purchases should generally be passing the actual transaction value where technically possible. A £20 purchase and a £2,000 purchase should not automatically look identical.

5. Check duplicated conversions

Make sure one customer action is not being counted multiple times through:

• Google Ads tags
• GA4 imports
• CRM imports
• Thank-you page tracking
• Form events

Duplicate conversions can distort both volume and value.

6. Compare Google Ads with the CRM

This is where the useful questions start. Which campaigns generated:

• Leads?
• Qualified leads?
• Opportunities?
• Customers?
• Revenue?
• Profit?

The answer may look completely different at every stage.

7. Calculate real lead values

Use historical sales data. If 100 leads generate ten customers worth an average £3,000 each, those leads clearly have commercial value. Start quantifying it.

8. Feed deeper-funnel conversions back

Where possible, import qualified leads, completed sales or other meaningful offline outcomes. Move your optimisation target closer to revenue.

9. Remove meaningless bidding signals

You can still measure useful secondary actions. They just do not necessarily need to influence bidding. Keep reporting and optimisation separate.

10. Review your bidding strategy

Only once the conversion data makes sense should you ask whether the campaign is optimising towards conversions or towards value. Then make sure the bidding strategy matches the commercial objective.

The algorithm is only as smart as the target you give it

There is a tendency to talk about Google Ads automation as though the algorithm understands your company. It does not. It understands patterns in the data available to it.

If your account says every lead is equal, Google can treat every lead as equal. If your account says every conversion is worth £0, it cannot magically discover your profit margins. If your account counts brochure downloads as seriously as customers, the algorithm does not know your sales director thinks otherwise.

The responsibility sits with the advertiser.

Your job is not simply to collect conversion data. Your job is to make sure the data represents what the business actually wants.

Conclusion

Conversion tracking is not finished when the tag starts firing. That is just the beginning. The real question is this.

What are you teaching Google with that conversion?

If every action has no value, the system cannot distinguish between low-value and high-value outcomes when you ask it to optimise for value. If every lead has the same arbitrary value, you may be hiding enormous differences in commercial quality. If your tracking ends at the enquiry form, Google may never discover which leads actually become customers.

Start by looking at:

• What your primary conversions actually are
• What value each conversion carries
• Whether those values reflect real business economics
• Which leads become qualified
• Which leads become customers
• How much those customers are worth
• Whether that information can be fed back into Google Ads

The closer your conversion data gets to revenue, the more useful your automation becomes. If you would rather work through it with somebody, a PPC consultant can do this alongside your existing team.

Smart Bidding does not know which conversions matter to your business. You have to teach it.

Find out what Google is really optimising towards

We audit Google Ads accounts to find broken conversion tracking, misleading bidding signals, wasted spend and campaigns optimising towards actions that do not generate profitable business. If your campaigns are producing conversions but those conversions are not turning into enough revenue, the problem may not be your ads. It may be what you have told Google a successful conversion looks like.

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