Your CRM only sends form leads back to Google
A lot of well-run accounts have an offline conversion upload. Completed, paid jobs go from the CRM back to Google Ads, matched on the click ID that was captured when the lead came in. It is the right idea and it is better than most accounts manage.
Ask one question: how does a phone lead get a click ID into the CRM?
Usually it does not. The receptionist takes the call, types the name and number into the CRM, and there is no click ID because there was no form. When the job completes, the upload looks for a click ID to match on, finds none, and skips it. Every phone-originated customer is invisible to the upload.
What Google learns from that
Forms produce customers. Calls produce nothing. So bid on whatever produces forms.
In a trades business where calls close at over 50 per cent and forms at about 20, that is the machine being taught the opposite of the truth. An owner we worked with spotted this himself once we described the mechanism. His Monday.com to Zapier upload had never sent a phone job back in two years.
The fix
Enhanced conversions for leads. The upload matches on hashed email or phone number as well as click ID, so a customer with no click ID still gets attributed to the click that produced the call. Google hashes the same fields on its side.
Call tracking that captures the click ID on the call itself, so ad calls arrive with one. Calls from the search results covers how.
And a loop rather than a one-way upload. Google to call tracking to the automation to the CRM and back to Google. Stage changes trigger the upload. New customers join the exclusion audience so their update calls stop counting. The CRM stays current because the automation does the boring part.
The second leak
Existing customers ring the number in the ad. That call counts as a conversion. The account is paying to be phoned by people it already has. A Customer Match exclusion, refreshed from the CRM on a schedule, stops it.