Conversion tracking for bookkeeping firms, valued on the retainer not the enquiry

What owners usually notice first: Google Ads reports a steady stream of conversions, yet the discovery calls on the calendar are few, and the proposals that do get signed in Ignition rarely trace back to an ad. Three things cause it. 'QuickBooks bookkeeper' searches pull in people trying to reach Intuit support, find a login page or get hired. The discovery call is booked on Calendly or a TaxDome or Karbon intake page that the site's tags can't see inside, so the most important step never reaches Google Ads. And the signed proposal, the real win, sits in a proposal tool on another domain with no click ID attached.

The cost is a budget trained on the wrong people. A catch-up project and a monthly client paying for years look identical to Google, and a support seeker who stayed on the phone looks better than both. The ten-minute check: take the last ten signed engagements, write next to each whether it is monthly or one-off and where the client first came from. Then open Google Ads, Goals, and look at which actions are Primary. If phone-link clicks or form views are Primary, or you can't name the source for most of the ten, the ads are being judged on noise.

Fixed looks like this: a booked discovery call that fires once, from the scheduler itself, with the click ID passed through; a signed-engagement conversion sent from the practice system with the monthly fee as its value and catch-up work valued separately; and a monthly table of cost per signed monthly client by channel. That is the first thing the free audit puts together from your own client list.