A correction I had to make
When my own audit finding was wrong
On the tattoo studio account above, my first audit flagged the page-view conversion action as a vanity metric and said the reported cost per lead was meaningless. That was the headline finding, written up in red.
Then I asked the client what the page actually was. It was the post-submission thank-you page, so the leads were real after all and roughly £8 a form fill was a genuinely good number. My reading was wrong.
I corrected the audit in writing the same day, kept the real underlying issue (wrong category, counted many times per click, no phone call tracking at all), and fixed those properly. The client has the correction on file.
I am putting that on a page meant to win me work because it is the thing I would want to know about somebody before hiring them: what they do when they get something wrong in front of a client.
A fair warning
What I will not do
- Report page views as conversions because the number looks better
- Leave brand and non-brand merged in a single reporting line
- Claim credit for brand searches that would have converted anyway
- Restructure a live account without written approval of the changes
- Hide a bad month. If spend went up and leads went down, that is what the report says
Two platform traps worth knowing
The keyword report includes your negatives
Query keyword performance in GAQL and the results mix positive keywords with negative ones. Report on that without filtering negatives out first and your keyword list, and anything you conclude from it, is wrong.
Presence or interest is not presence
The default location setting includes people merely showing interest in your area. On the account above, that default sent 51% of the brand budget to clicks over ten miles away or abroad, for a single conversion.
