Google Ads Diagnostic Analysis & Conversion Tracking Recovery

The client's Google Ads account experienced a sudden and severe performance decline—reported conversions dropped to near-zero while cost-per-acquisition increased by orders of magnitude over several weeks. The marketing team had responded by cutting budgets and pausing campaigns, but the underlying cause remained unidentified. I was brought in to diagnose what went wrong and recommend a path to recovery. The analysis involved correlating Google Ads change history logs against weekly performance data to identify which configuration changes preceded the decline. By mapping timestamps of specific account modifications to the performance inflection points, I traced the primary trigger to a conversion tracking configuration change that switched the Salesforce lead import from a primary optimization signal to "observe only"—meaning Google Ads stopped counting actual leads in its bidding algorithms. This was compounded by subsequent changes including UTM parameter removal from Performance Max landing pages (breaking attribution), reactive budget cuts across campaigns, and eventually all GA4 form conversions being demoted to secondary status. The key insight was distinguishing between a true performance decline versus a measurement failure. By cross-referencing Salesforce lead data against the periods showing minimal conversions in Google Ads, we confirmed leads were still arriving—they just weren't being tracked. The budget cuts made in response to apparently poor dashboard metrics created a compounding cycle: broken tracking made performance look terrible, triggering budget cuts that reduced data volume, which prevented the algorithm from recovering even after partial fixes were attempted. The deliverable was a comprehensive audit report documenting the timeline of changes, their attributed impacts, and a prioritized remediation checklist: restore form conversions as primary actions, rebuild tracking templates, restore UTM parameters across campaigns, and realign campaign goals to account defaults. The analysis also identified geographic targeting inefficiencies, conversion goal misalignment (optimizing for low-value actions instead of lead submissions), and keyword performance patterns. This work provided the foundation for rebuilding the account with proper measurement infrastructure.