Check it yourself: the measurement library

This page is the index to every measurement self-check on this site. Every check here runs on public data or inside your own Google Ads and Tag Manager accounts, so you can verify what you are being told without paying a vendor, an auditor, or me.

I wrote these guides because most of the problems I get called in to fix are visible to the owner within twenty minutes, provided someone shows them where to look. Use this library in that spirit. Start with the symptom you have, follow the guide, and only then decide whether you need help.

One caution before you start accusing anyone of anything. In my 2026 takeover work, 30 of 70 suspected tracking problems proved false once I actually opened the Google Tag Manager container and checked. Run the check before you run the argument.

Where should I start?

Start with The three receipts. It is the standing test for any account: three pieces of evidence that prove your reporting matches reality, and a plain method for pulling each one yourself. If an account passes all three, most of the guides below become optional reading. If it fails even one, the rest of this library tells you where the fault probably sits.

What do I check when the report looks good but the phone is quiet?

Google Ads says I have conversions but I get no leads covers the most common version of this: a conversion action that counts something other than a real enquiry. One account I took over counted 75% of all clicks as conversions because the tag fired on page load. This guide shows you how to find that kind of fault in your own account.

Our website relaunched and the leads dropped is for the specific week after a new site goes live. Relaunches commonly break tags and redirects at the same time, which makes the ads look broken when the measurement is what actually died. Work through this before you touch a single campaign setting.

What do I check when the spend or the costs look wrong?

My Google Ads budget is going to random apps and websites explains how a Search campaign quietly opts into the Display network through a checkbox in campaign settings. In accounts I have taken over, between 43% and 59% of spend leaked to junk placements this way, mostly mobile games and unrelated sites. The check takes minutes and needs nothing beyond your own account.

My Google Ads cost per click suddenly increased walks through the usual causes, including Quality Score, which reflects expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, and raises your cost per click when it slips. It also covers broad match keywords expanding into searches you never intended, and why the negative keyword list needs a regular review.

How do I judge the people running the account?

Is my ads agency doing a good job? gives you a structured way to answer that question with evidence instead of gut feel. It relies on the same receipts and account checks as the rest of this library, so an agency has nowhere to hide behind a polished monthly report.

How to check if a company is running Google Ads teaches the outside-in checks: the Ads Transparency Center at adstransparency.google.com, which shows every advertiser's ads, last-shown dates and regions with no login, plus reading a page's source for gtag, GTM- and AW- markers. Useful for scouting competitors, and for verifying that a vendor's claimed client work actually exists.

What do the terms in these guides mean?

Four short glossary pages back the library up, each written so you can act on the definition rather than just recite it.

What is a Google Tag Manager container? explains the box that holds your measurement tags, and shows that containers are public at googletagmanager.com/gtm.js followed by the container ID, which means you can inspect one and search it for AW- conversion IDs yourself.

What is a conversion action? covers the single setting most accounts get wrong, including why lead generation should count one conversion per click rather than every conversion.

What is smart bidding and when does it fail? explains that automated bidding optimises toward whatever the conversion action counts, degrades without conversion data, and re-learns slowly, which is why measurement faults poison it for weeks.

What is remarketing and audience decay? covers the audiences your tags build daily, and why they shrink irrecoverably for every day a site runs untagged.

What if the check finds a real problem?

Most fixes in these guides are within reach of a patient owner, and the guides are written so you can do them yourself. If you would rather hand it over, I fix tracking for a fixed fee of R4,500 to R8,000 depending on the mess, and my rule holds either way: fix measurement first, then judge the campaigns, because judging campaigns on broken numbers wastes everyone's time.