- 01
Write down what a customer is
Before any setting is touched: the actions that mean money to you, and what each is worth on average. One page, in your language, signed off by you.
- 02
Set the property up correctly
Time zone, currency, data retention and the reporting identity settings. Dull, five minutes, and wrong on a startling number of accounts we inherit.
- 03
Turn each action into a measured event
Forms, phone taps, bookings, chats, orders. Each named once, consistently, with the detail that matters travelling alongside it — service, suburb, value.
- 04
Mark the ones that count as conversions
Only the actions that mean a customer. Marking everything as a conversion is the same as marking nothing, because the bidding cannot then tell them apart.
- 05
Attach values
From your own average job size, not from a benchmark. This is what lets you compare a channel producing many cheap enquiries against one producing few expensive jobs.
- 06
Filter out what is not a customer
Your own staff, your developers, known bots and monitoring services. On a lower-traffic site this alone can move the conversion rate by a meaningful amount.
- 07
Fix the link tagging
One consistent way of labelling every campaign, email and social link, so traffic stops disappearing into “direct” and you can see what each channel actually did.
- 08
Join up your other domains
Booking systems, checkouts and portals stitched into the same visit, so a sale is credited to the ad that started it rather than to your own homepage.
- 09
Connect it to the ad platforms
Conversions and audiences shared with Google Ads so bidding reads the real thing. Until that link exists, the account is optimising toward whatever it was left counting.
- 10
Build the two reports you will actually open
Where customers came from, and where people give up. Everything else is available if you want it, but those two are the ones that change decisions.
