Google is optimising toward whatever you told it a conversion is.

Automated bidding is very good at producing more of whatever you defined as a conversion. If that definition is a form submission, it will find the people most likely to submit forms.

Those are not the same people as the ones most likely to buy, and the gap between the two populations is not small in most accounts.

So a campaign can win on cost per conversion for a year while producing the worst revenue in the account, and nothing inside the platform would ever report it.

Matching leads to closed sales gives the number the bidding was never optimising for. What you then do with it — change the campaign, change the budget, or feed a better signal back — is a decision the report informs rather than makes.

A single account can run exact-match search alongside broad automated inventory, and those are different products with different buyers reached at different moments.

Reported together at the account level, the cheap conversions from one subsidise the expensive ones from the other and the average describes neither.

Where the export carries a campaign type or network, splitting on it is usually the first real finding, and it is often uncomfortable: the campaign with the best cost per conversion is frequently the one producing the least revenue.

The same applies to brand versus non-brand. Brand terms convert people who were already coming; blended into the account they make the whole thing look efficient.

For services, a large share of what Google produces is a phone call, and the platform records it as a conversion the moment it lasts long enough.

Call duration is not intent. A ninety-second call can be a wrong number, a price check or a booked job, and the platform cannot tell them apart.

Using the caller's number as the lead key and the ledger as the judge replaces duration with money, which changes which campaigns look good in almost every account that tries it.

It also puts a real number on the calls nobody answered, which is usually an operational problem being mistaken for a channel problem.

It does not connect to your Google Ads account, and it does not write anything back into it. It reads two files you exported.

It does not claim a sale for a campaign where nothing in the file links them. A sale with no matching lead is reported as Direct / Unknown, whatever the platform would have modelled.

It does not produce a view-through or a modelled number. Every figure in the report traces to a row in a file you can open, which is the property that makes it usable in an argument.

That restraint is the point. A number you can defend to a finance director is worth more than a larger number you cannot.