Why Google Ads counts your junk enquiries as sales

Most businesses running Google Ads trust the number at the top of their conversion report. A quieter problem is that the number often counts the wrong things, and an Auckland agency reckons it has found a way to fix it.

The issue sits in how Google Ads decides what counts as a conversion. When someone fills in a website contact form, the site fires a signal to Google and Google records a conversion. It does not read the message. It cannot tell whether the submission came from a serious buyer chasing a quote or from someone using the form to sell the business a new logo.

To Google Ads, every form fill looks identical. One enquiry, one conversion, counted and filed.

The flaw nobody sees in the report

For many businesses that assumption holds up. For lead-generation operators, trades, professional services and B2B firms in particular, it does not. A large share of what lands in a contact form is outbound sales pitches, job applications and routine admin queries, and Google treats all of it as proof the ad worked.

That matters because of how the platform now spends money. Google’s Smart Bidding learns from conversions and goes hunting for more people like the ones who converted. Feed it people asking for quotes and it finds more of them. Feed it cold-callers and job seekers and it gets very good at finding more cold-callers and job seekers.

The non-buyers are usually the cheaper, more plentiful crowd, so the system drifts toward them. The conversion count stays healthy while the cost of reaching a real customer climbs. The problem is not that Google’s AI is bad at its job. It is that nothing ever told it which form fills were worth chasing.

What the plugin does about it

Roger McSaveney from Forge Creative says the pattern was hard to miss once the agency started looking across its clients.

“I noticed a lot of our clients had the same issue. Their Google Ads campaigns were set to optimise for conversions, and the conversion was a form fill, but in many cases those form fills weren’t people wanting to buy. They were people trying to sell their own product, or looking for a job, and over time it tended to get worse, not better.”

“Google was seeing a form fill and calling it a conversion without being able to read the message in the form, then optimising to find other people who behaved the same way. In a lot of cases that was a salesperson working through a sector, filling out contact forms to sell their product, not someone looking for a quote.”

TrueConversion, the plugin the agency built in response, sets out to do the one thing Google Ads does not. It reads the form fill.

When a submission arrives, it first records where the lead came from, capturing the UTM parameters and the Google Click ID so each enquiry ties back to a specific ad and keyword. Its AI then reads the content of the message and judges whether it is a genuine commercial enquiry or junk. Only the genuine ones are marked as conversions, and only those are sent back to Google as offline conversions through the platform’s offline conversion API.

The aim, according to the company, is to retrain Google’s own optimisation on real buyer behaviour rather than on whoever happened to fill in the form. It does not replace Google Ads or block anything. It feeds the platform the signal it was missing.

There are limits, and they are worth stating plainly. The plugin does not stop a salesperson filling in the form, and it cannot turn a quote request into a sale. Some people asking for a quote are still only kicking tyres. What it changes is the spending pattern behind the scenes, so a business stops paying click after click for Google to track down more of the wrong people.

Built in Auckland by Forge Creative

The tool comes from Forge Creative, an Auckland web design and marketing agency whose work includes sites for Snowplanet, I Love Ponsonby, Silent Pod and Safe365. The agency also runs Google Ads campaigns for clients, which is where the problem tends to surface first, and where the idea for a productised fix came from.

It is built for WordPress, and works with nine of the common form plugins, among them Contact Form 7, WPForms, Gravity Forms, Elementor Pro and Jetpack. A free tier handles lead tracking and source capture and makes no external API calls, while a paid tier at $79 a month adds the AI classification and the upload to Google Ads. The company says data stays on the business’s own server and that only the minimum needed to classify a lead is ever sent on.

Whether it earns its place will depend on how much of a given business’s contact-form traffic is genuine, something most owners only discover once they start reading the forms instead of counting them. For the large share of New Zealand firms living on form-based enquiries, it is at least a reminder that the conversion number is not the same thing as a customer.

Running Google Ads for your own business? Tell us in the comments whether your conversion count matches the leads that actually turn into customers.

This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂