Ads bring leads, the phone rings, forms arrive, and still there are no sales. The first thought is: “the ads don’t work, let’s change the contractor.” Sometimes that is true. But often the person did call, and nobody answered, nobody called back, or the answer sent them to a competitor. Here is how to find out yourself in half an hour where exactly the money is lost: in the ads or after them.
We checked the facts and names against Google’s help pages and the services’ own pages on October 27, 2026. Section names in call tracking services depend on the service and the plan, so we describe them in words.
1. A lead is not yet a sale
Ads can let you down in two places.
- Before the lead. The wrong people come: they ask about something you do not sell, they are from another city, they look for something free. Then the problem is in the ads: the searches they show for, the promises in the ad, what the account counts as a lead. We wrote about checking this in the articles on what your ads count as a lead and on spam leads from ads.
- After the lead. The right people came, but nobody called back, the answer took a day, or nobody listened. Then the ads did their job and the sales team loses the money.
The ad account will not show this difference: to it, the lead is counted, full stop. So you need to listen to the calls themselves. There is a separate article on how to pass real sales, not just leads, back to the ads: offline conversions.
2. Step one: open the call log in call tracking
Call tracking is a service that gives visitors from ads a separate phone number and records where each call came from, how long it lasted and whether anyone picked up.
Why Google Ads alone is not enough. Google forwarding numbers, which count calls from ads on their own, are available only in certain countries. Google’s help page lists 30 countries as of October 27, 2026, including Poland, Germany and the United States, but not Ukraine. So in Ukraine, real conversations are counted either by a separate call tracking number or by your own records in the phone and CRM.
Services that do this: Binotel and Ringostat. For example, Ringostat states on its page that it identifies the call source down to the keyword and stores call recordings. Check with the service what your plan includes.
3. Step two: keep only calls from ads and count the missed ones
In the log, filter by source: calls from ads only (not from a business card, search or regular customers). Now count for a week:
- how many calls came from ads in total;
- how many of them were missed;
- how many missed calls were called back, and how fast.
This is the most honest number in the whole story. If three of ten calls from ads were missed and never returned, three tenths of your ad budget went to a call into the void. No change of ad text will fix that.
4. Step three: listen to five calls longer than twenty seconds
Pick five calls from ads that lasted longer than twenty seconds and listen to them in full. Why twenty. Call tracking practitioners consider calls of ten to twenty seconds almost always accidental or wrong numbers, and longer ones usually real interest. This is a rule of thumb from practitioners, not a Google rule. For call conversions, Google asks you to set the minimum call length yourself and does not name a single number in its help.
Listen to two people: the customer and the one who answers. Then it becomes clear.
The customer asked the wrong thing. They asked about a service you do not offer, another city, a price ten times lower. So the problem is in the ads: the searches they show for, or what the ad and the site promise.
The customer asked exactly what you sell, and then nothing happened. The manager did not know the price, did not offer a next step, did not take a contact, did not call back when promised. So the problem is in sales. Changing the contractor is pointless here: new ads will bring the same people to the same conversation.
Both. Sometimes both at once: part of the calls are not yours, and you lose half of those that are. That is normal; fix them one at a time.
5. How long you have to call back: a disputed number
People often say: process a lead within five minutes, after that the chance drops sharply. We looked for what this rests on. The popular “five minutes” figures come from studies of 2007 to 2012, retold many times by vendors that sell sales software. We found no fresh independent measurement showing how response speed changes a sale in Ukraine. So we promise no specific number.
Common sense is simpler than the numbers: a person who left a request probably left it with two or three other companies too. The later you answer, the more likely they have already agreed with someone else. Measure your real callback time from the call log and set a goal for the week.
6. What if leads come from forms and messengers
The same, just without calls. Take the five latest leads from ads and check:
- When did the lead arrive and when was it answered?
- What was the answer: a question, an offer, or just “we will be in touch”?
- Is the result recorded in the CRM or a spreadsheet: bought, declined, not answering?
Without the third point you will not know where sales come from. And without that you can neither prove the ads work nor find where they do not.
7. What to do with the result
If the ads are to blame. Look at which searches they showed for and add irrelevant words to negative keywords (words for which the ad is switched off). Check that the ad and the site honestly say what you do, where and for how much. Check that the account counts a real action as a lead, not a click on the number.
If sales are to blame. This is not a verdict on people; usually it is a lack of rules. Agree who picks up the phone, how fast they call back, what they say in the first minute and where they record the result. A call outside working hours should also land somewhere: we wrote about this in the article on calls after 6 pm. You do not have to buy anything expensive: a spreadsheet and one person who checks missed calls every morning is enough to start.
If the numbers disagree. Sometimes the ad account shows one number of leads and the CRM another. That is a separate topic, and not always about deception: see the article on Meta and CRM numbers that differ.
8. From our practice
When owners come with the phrase “we have leads but no sales”, it very often turns out that nobody looked at the call log: everyone argues about ad settings while the answer lies in the call recordings. This is our experience, not statistics: we give no separate numbers.
Summary: what to do this week
- Set up a separate number for ads in call tracking, if you do not have one yet.
- Keep only calls from ads in the log and count missed calls and callback time.
- Listen to five calls longer than twenty seconds.
- If customers ask the wrong thing, fix the ads. If they asked the right thing and nobody called back, start with sales.
- Record the result of every lead: bought, declined, not answering.
See how we set up and evaluate advertising in the Google Ads for business section.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we’ll look at your account and tell you what counts as a lead there and whether it matches real calls.