458,611 clicks, 411 conversions, and $16,878 + TRY 165K paid anyway

Why the number was wrong

These were affiliate campaigns. The ads pointed straight at the merchant's page through an affiliate tracking link — direct linking, which Google Ads permitted at the time and prohibits now.

When an ad sends a click to an external domain you do not own, the sale fires a pixel on the affiliate network's servers. Google Ads never sees that event. There is no tag on the merchant's checkout page that reports back, because the checkout page is not yours. So the conversion column stays near zero while the commissions accumulate somewhere Google Ads cannot read.

The 411 conversions were not the result. They were the small subset of events that happened to fire somewhere Google Ads could still observe — an app install, one merchant with a tag in place.

None of this makes the reporting broken in a bug sense. Google Ads reported exactly what it could measure. The failure was in reading that column as if it measured the outcome.

Why it matters to an account that isn't yours

Almost every "our account is underperforming" brief I read describes the same shape: spend continues, clicks continue, the conversion number falls or flatlines, and the bidding strategy gets blamed.

But the two failures look identical in the interface. A campaign that genuinely stopped converting and a campaign whose conversions stopped being recorded produce the same falling line. One costs you a rebuild you didn't need; the other costs you months of a smart bidding strategy optimising toward a signal that stopped arriving.

A wasted click is loud — it appears in the search terms report with a cost beside it. A conversion that silently stopped firing shows you nothing at all. One side of the ledger complains; the other goes quiet. That asymmetry is why tracking problems get misdiagnosed as bidding problems for months.

So before touching a bid, a budget or a keyword, the first question is always the same one: is the conversion data telling the truth? Check the conversion action's status and its last-recorded timestamp. Compare the platform's count against the merchant's own back end. Find out whether a tag, a form, or a redirect changed near the date performance "dropped". That check takes under an hour and it decides which of two completely different jobs you are actually doing.

The spend, by account

Sixteen accounts under two logins, exported all-time and all-status — including removed campaigns and cancelled accounts, which Google Ads hides from the default view. That hiding is its own lesson: most of this history was invisible until the filters were changed.

What you would actually get

A written audit. Every finding attached to the screenshot or the report row that proves it, ranked by what it costs you per month, each with a specific fix. Read-only access is enough — no changes to your account without your sign-off, in writing, one item at a time.