The Real Cost of Bad Data: How Poor Lead Attribution Hurts Your PPC ROI

Bad data doesn't just cloud your reporting. It drains budget, misguides bidding, and hides what's truly working. In PPC, attribution is the bridge between clicks and revenue. When that bridge is shaky, everything downstream suffers.

Missing or broken conversion tracking is more common than you'd think. Forms get updated without updating the tracking code. Phone call tracking breaks after a website migration. Sales that happen offline never get logged back into the ad platform. Then there's the problem of treating all leads equally. A spam form fill gets counted the same as a qualified demo request from your ideal customer. When you optimize toward "more conversions" without distinguishing quality, you're teaching the algorithm to find more garbage.

Inflated conversion values create an even worse problem. You assign estimated revenue to leads before they close, and suddenly your dashboard shows profitability that doesn't exist in your bank account. The revenue you thought you generated never materializes, but the ad spend was very real.

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