247 bookings that were actually page views

Your conversion tracking might be counting things that were never conversions. I audited a venue account recently where Google Ads reported 247 bookings in a single month, and when I dug into it, 231 of those so-called bookings turned out to be nothing more than page views. Three were genuine. The owner had been looking at those numbers believing the ads were working, and in a sense they were, because the machine was doing exactly what it had been told to do. Somewhere along the line, it had been told that loading a page is the same as taking a booking.

Why do my conversions look too good to be true?

In Google Analytics, a created event rule can quietly turn any page view into a conversion. You set the rule to count everyone who lands on the booking page, and that is precisely what it counts, so the venue’s account had been quietly reporting 231 page visits as 231 bookings for the best part of a month. The genuine mid-funnel signal, the event that actually indicates someone is serious enough to book, fired just three times in the same window. That was the whole story in one comparison: 231 phantom bookings against three real intentions.

This matters because Smart Bidding was optimising to the fake number the entire time. Google’s machines do not judge your conversions, they simply buy more of whatever you feed them, and if you feed them page views, they will spend your budget acquiring page views. The account was being tuned, day after day, to produce a result that had never actually happened.

How do I check my conversion tracking actually works?

You can do this yourself, and it is not a technical job. Open Google Ads, go to the conversions list, and look at how each conversion was set up. Anything labelled as a page view, a button click or a created event deserves suspicion, because those are the setups that count activity rather than intent. Then do the boring but reliable version of quality control: compare the reported number to reality. The venue knew exactly how many tours it was really doing, and the gap between what the account reported and what the business actually saw told the whole story without any further investigation.

If you run a business where a conversion means money coming in, the reported number should sit close enough to reality that you never have to defend it, and if it does not, that is not a mystery to live with, it is a problem to fix.

What did the fix look like?

Unspectacular, which is how these fixes usually are. The rule was deleted, both conversion paths were verified properly, the booking event was set to count once per click, and the catch-all form event was demoted so it could not double count. None of it was clever, and none of it required a technical expert. The expensive part is noticing the number is wrong in the first place, and the only reliable way to notice is to know your own business numbers well enough that a fake conversion stands out like a sore thumb.

Your ads will do exactly what you tell them, and they will do it at scale. The question is whether you are telling them the truth, and if you are not sure, that is worth checking this week rather than next quarter, because every day the account optimises to a phantom number, the budget follows it.