Your Google Ads dashboard says 6x ROAS. Your revenue has not moved in three months. Both of these things are true — and this is how it happens.
The Attribution Gap Nobody Talks About
Google Ads reports conversions based on the last click that came through a Google Ad. If a customer sees your ad, does not convert, comes back three days later via a direct visit, and then converts — Google Ads takes 100% of the credit if you have view-through or cross-channel attribution misconfigured.
This artificially inflates reported ROAS while the actual contribution of paid search to revenue is much lower. We have seen accounts reporting 8x ROAS where the real number, after proper GA4 attribution, was closer to 3x.
Smart Bidding Is Not Smart If It Has Bad Data
Target ROAS and Target CPA bidding strategies rely entirely on the conversion data you feed them. If your conversion tracking is firing on page views instead of confirmed purchases or form submissions — which is an extremely common misconfiguration — the algorithm is optimising for the wrong signal. It will report excellent results while driving traffic that never actually converts to revenue.
The Three Checks to Do This Week
- Audit your conversion actions in Google Ads. Go to Tools → Conversions. Are you tracking actual purchase events or just page views and session starts? Remove any conversion action that does not represent real business value.
- Check for double-counting. If you have both Google Tag Manager and the Google Ads tag firing independently, you may be counting the same conversion twice. This is the most common inflation culprit.
- Compare Google Ads reported conversions to actual CRM or revenue data. If Google Ads reports 50 conversions but your CRM only received 20 leads that month, you have a tracking problem.
The Fix
Set up conversion tracking through Google Tag Manager, firing only on confirmed thank-you pages or specific purchase-complete events. Import offline conversions from your CRM if you have a sales team. Use GA4 as your source of truth for attribution, and treat Google Ads numbers as directional rather than absolute.
Once your data is clean, ROAS will likely drop in the dashboard. That is not a problem — that is accuracy. And accurate data is what allows you to make real optimisation decisions.