Five ways a lead could reach them.
Four of which were broken.

One real lead conversion against $4,000+ of spend, and it was a call, not a form. 90% of impressions were mobile, which changes what “just fix the form” actually means.

What Everybody Believed

Five suspected problems were handed to us as fact. Three did not exist. Networks and geo targeting were already correct, and the campaign being judged on a year of failure had been switched on six weeks earlier. The year of spend belonged to campaigns that were already paused.

The Root Cause

The site had migrated and the measurement layer stayed behind. Conversion actions pointed at a retired subdomain and a replaced phone number. Invisible from inside the ad platform, because on the surface the actions look perfectly configured.

We rebuilt the dead action. It still did not fire, and that was the real finding: the form had been placed where a conversion could not report from at all, by a system nobody in the account controlled.

Bidding had also been switched to automated by an applied recommendation rather than a decision, optimising toward a goal set in which every action was broken. Not toward the wrong thing. Toward nothing.

You cannot see that from inside the reporting tool. You can only see it from outside.

What We Did

• Turned off automated bidding first. You do not hand an algorithm a target it cannot see.
• Rebuilt the keyword set and negative list, and the campaign cleared its Limited status.
• Rebuilt lead capture across all three sub-accounts, verified on the live forms.
• Carried the tracking across that gap ourselves, then verified it end to end: ad click, landing page, populated CRM field.

Where It Stands

The loop back to the ad platform ran end to end. Five contacts entered it in August and the platform recorded exactly five conversions.

A second check: five conversions over thirteen days of coverage extends to about twelve across a month, and the CRM independently reports eleven paid-search enquiries for August. Two systems that don’t talk to each other, landing on the same number.