Case study · Google Ads audit
The account that was marking its own homework
Birmingham flooring installer · £22/day budget · what a takeover audit found inside the “£15 per lead” dashboard
Reported conversions
42.69
Real enquiries found
~20
Reported cost per lead
£15.42
True cost per lead
£28–35
01
The situation
ProFlo-style trades accounts often arrive looking healthy. This one showed 42.69 conversions in 30 days at £15.42 each — exceptional numbers for jobs worth £1,600+. Which is exactly why we didn't believe them.
Our rule on every takeover: audit the measurement before you touch the media. If the numbers in the dashboard aren't real, every decision made from them is a guess wearing a suit.
02
What the 42.69 “conversions” were actually made of
Real form leads
Real phone calls
Double-counted duplicates
Button taps counted as leads
Strip out the duplicates and the button taps and roughly 20 real enquiries remain — form fills and phone calls from actual humans. The account had been counting the same people twice and calling a tap a customer.
03
Cost per real lead
Dashboard claimed
Audit estimate
First clean week (live)
The numbers get honest before they get better.
The first clean week of live data came in at £35.23 per real lead — inside the range the audit predicted. Nothing got worse. The reporting just stopped flattering itself.
Want to know what your real cost per lead is?
We audit the measurement before we touch the media — so the numbers you make decisions from are the ones that actually happened.