In this single‑speaker presentation, Aaron Young warns marketers and business owners that Google Ads dashboards can be misleading if taken at face value. He walks through a real account where reported conversions dropped dramatically (from around 620 to 260) while ad spend rose from $13k to $21k, and the conversion rate fell. Young shows that the platform’s metrics hide the true health of the business: the number of genuine paying conversions versus mere inquiries. By comparing month‑on‑month and weekly data, he demonstrates that despite the platform’s negative signals, the business actually saw growth in paid conversions when looking at the correct KPIs. He argues that budgeting and optimization decisions must be driven by real business outcomes—leads, paying customers, sales, and revenue—not by Google Ads’ internal numbers. Finally, he advises owners to demand that agencies, freelancers, or in‑house teams regularly report on these business‑centric metrics, otherwise they should find a new ad manager.
Chapters
When it comes to Google Ads, please don't let your in-data dashboard data really make you lose picture of what's happening inside of your business. Let me show you an example. So if you were to look at this dashboard, and I can guarantee you that if an external agency did a review of this account, they would actually absolutely pull it apart because you can see here the conversions have gone down from 600 conversions, you know, 623 conversions, and now they're getting somewhere between, you know, 260 and 280 conversions. But we've actually increased the cost from $13,000 a month up to $21,000 a month. And the conversion rate has gone down, although it started to go back up here. And as I said, an agency could easily pull this apart who was trying to get a client and just say that we've actually absolutely done a terrible job. But, and this is the big problem and the real big disconnect, is because it's not about what Google Ads is saying. You need to always be focused on the real business results. And— Yeah. Let's go now and have a look at the real business results. So right now, this is the same business. And once again, as a reminder, in January last year, they were getting up to 600, 670, 667 conversions. Now they're down at about 270, 260, they had 170 here. But let's look at the month-on-month results. So once again, you know, you can see that big slide going down. But when we look at the actual data for inquiries versus conversions, For this business, inquiries, people who inquire, conversions, people who are actually paying for the service. You can see from here is that they were getting a whole heap of inquiries, but just no conversions. So let's go back month on month. So May, 156 conversions, whereas May last year was 68. Let's look at April, 113 versus April last year, 69. Even when we had a lower month in February of 81 conversions, the previous one was 74. And then when you look weekly, you can see since we've taken on this account last September, they've seen weekly increases. Obviously there's been some seasonal flows here, but the trend line is going up. And that's why always, yes, you do need to have a look at the Google Ads dashboard, but what is deciding your decisions in terms of where you're spending your money, how you're allocating your budgets, always has to come back to what is happening inside the business. So if you're a business owner and your agency or freelancer or even your in-house team are not asking you on a weekly or monthly basis of what's really happening inside of the business in terms of leads, conversions, sales, and revenue, you need to find someone else to run your ads. It's not about what's happening inside of Google Ads. It's always about what's happening inside of the business and inside of your business bank accounts. Thank you.
