Your ads run everywhere, the account shows “leads”, but you don’t get more customers. Many businesses see this after launching a Performance Max campaign (a Google Ads campaign type that shows ads on its own across Search, YouTube, other websites, Maps and Gmail). Often the problem is not the campaign itself but what it was told to count as a lead. Below: how this works, where to see where the money went, and what to count instead of clicks.
We checked the facts and menu names against the English-language Google Ads Help on 26 October 2026. Depending on your interface version, names may differ slightly.
1. The campaign takes money where a “lead” is easiest to get
Performance Max decides on its own where to show your ads and learns from your conversions — the actions you marked as a result in Google Ads. Google Ads Help says it plainly: the campaign bids in real time on inventory predicted to deliver the most efficient conversions, focusing on the channels most likely to give the best results for your goals and budget.
In plain words: the campaign isn’t looking for customers, it’s looking for whatever you called a lead. If a lead is a purchase, it looks for buyers. If a lead is any tap on your phone number, it looks for people who tap. And not only customers tap.
2. Why a click on a phone number or messenger is a poor “lead”
A click on a phone number or on a Telegram, Viber or WhatsApp button is an intention, not an enquiry. The person may have tapped by accident, changed their mind or failed to get through. It can be worse:
- Accidental taps. If the event is set up on the whole site header, one accidental click on it counts as a “Telegram click” or a “phone click”.
- Repeats. One person taps the number three times — and the report shows three “calls” if the conversion’s count setting is “Every” rather than “One”.
- Bots and accidental clicks on websites and apps. Practitioners who run lead generation through Performance Max regularly see the same thing: most cheap junk traffic comes from the Display Network (banners on other websites and in apps) and from YouTube.
It becomes a loop: the campaign gets a “lead” from a cheap banner and sends even more budget there. The report shows more conversions; your phone doesn’t ring more.
A note on Ukraine, where most of our clients work. Google forwarding numbers, which count real calls from ads on their own, are not available in Ukraine: it isn’t on the country list in Google Ads Help (checked 26.10.2026; countries such as the US, the UK and Poland are). So “calls” in a Ukrainian account are almost always clicks on the number unless call tracking is connected. We covered what exactly your ads count as a lead in our web analytics checklist.
3. Check in five minutes: the channel performance report
Google Ads has a report that shows where Performance Max spends your money. The path from Help: go to Campaigns within the Campaigns menu → select the Insights and reports drop-down in the section menu → select Channel performance.
What you’ll see there:
- spend and conversions by channel: Google Search, Google Display Network, YouTube, Discover, Maps, Gmail and Search partners;
- you can add the “Conversion action” segment to the table and see which actions the campaign counts in each channel;
- the Status column flags problems with ads in a particular channel.
If the Display Network or YouTube takes a noticeable share of the budget and the “conversions” there are clicks on the number and messengers, that’s exactly the picture. Channel data is available from 6 June 2025.
You can now also limit the budget share for the Display Network — see our separate article. But without the right leads, the campaign will still learn from the wrong thing.
4. What to count as a lead instead of a click
Count what actually happened. For most small businesses, that’s four things.
A purchase or a submitted form
For a shop — a purchase with its value. For services — a submitted form, not a click on a “Book now” button: the click only opens the form. If your forms get a lot of spam, clean that up first — see our article on spam leads.
Calls — through call tracking
Call tracking is a separate number shown to visitors from ads that counts real conversations, not taps. Services such as Binotel or Ringostat show which ad led to the call, how long the conversation lasted and whether someone picked up.
What you send to Google Ads matters. Practitioners advise sending only qualified, unique or answered calls, not every call. For example, according to its help centre, Ringostat sends each inbound call to Google Analytics as a separate event with its status and duration, and you can make only qualified or answered calls a key event. Then the campaign learns from conversations, not from ringing tones.
Messengers — through a bot
A “Message us on Telegram” button proves nothing by itself. A bot is different, for example in SendPulse. According to the SendPulse knowledge base (updated 07.08.2025), a link to a Telegram bot goes through the intermediate domain tg.pulse.is and can carry variables and UTM tags. You can put the gclid — Google’s click identifier — there too.
How it works: a person from your ad opens the bot, and their contact is saved together with the gclid. Only someone who actually wrote becomes a lead, not someone who tapped a button. These people are uploaded to Google Ads as offline conversions by gclid. For this, auto-tagging must be on in Google Ads, and no more than 90 days may pass between the click and the upload (14 for some data sources). We explained how to pass sales and leads to Google from a spreadsheet or CRM in our article on offline conversions.
A business with an address — a separate local campaign
If you run a car service, salon, café or shop that people visit, there’s a separate option: Performance Max for store goals. According to Google Ads Help, it optimises only for offline conversions — store visits, store sales and local actions: “Call” and “Directions” clicks on your Business Profile in Maps. Once your locations are connected, Google Ads automatically creates the “Clicks to call” and “Local actions - Directions” conversion goals.
To be fair: “Call” on your profile is also a tap, not a conversation. But it comes from someone who found your business nearby, not from an accidental click on a gaming site. Our rule: in such a campaign, goals are local only — we don’t add website leads to it. A limitation from Help: local actions are not available for sensitive categories related to healthcare, religion, children and adult content.
How to switch without breaking the campaign
- Don’t delete the phone click. Make it a secondary action: Goals → Conversions → Summary → Edit goal → in “Conversion action optimization” choose “Secondary (observe only)”. It stays in the “All conversions” column but no longer affects bidding.
- Make a real lead primary — a purchase, a form, a call from call tracking, a message to the bot.
- Set the count to “One” for leads. Google recommends it for leads: no more than one conversion per ad click.
- Give the campaign time. According to Google Ads Help, Smart Bidding needs a 7–14 day learning period. You’ll get fewer real leads than clicks, and that’s normal — how many you need for stable performance is covered in our article on conversion thresholds.
- After two weeks, open Channel performance again and compare the share of the Display Network and YouTube with before.
Where sources disagree
- Is there really that much junk in Performance Max? Practitioners say yes: on lead generation the campaign brings a lot of cheap traffic from the Display Network; in February 2026, specialists in a professional chat reported local campaigns shifting budget to the Display Network for no visible reason. The other side: in a study by the traffic verification company Lunio (June 2026, data from July 2025 to March 2026, IT sector only), Performance Max had the lowest invalid traffic rate among Google campaign types — about 3.4%. But that’s an average across all channels combined, and the authors themselves say that breaking it down by placement is virtually impossible without independent verification. So “clean on average” doesn’t mean clean in your channel.
- Remove the phone click completely or keep it? Some remove it from conversions entirely and keep only purchases, so automated bidding doesn’t learn from substitutes. Others keep the click as a primary action with a small value next to purchases when purchases are few. Our approach is in between: we count phone clicks from mobile devices only and never call them calls; real leads are used for learning.
From our practice
The most common mistake we see in audits: everything is called “calls” in the report — real calls plus clicks on the number on the profile and on the website. Once this produced three times more “calls” than the client saw on their own phone, and it was the client who noticed. Now we break conversions down by action type before drawing any conclusion.
We tested the bot chain on a live account: after an ad click, a new contact appeared in SendPulse with a real gclid and a Google Ads source tag. So messenger enquiries from ads can be tracked without complex development.
Summary
- Performance Max moves budget to where it’s easiest to get what you called a lead.
- A click on a phone number or messenger is an intention, not an enquiry: it teaches the campaign to find people who tap, not people who buy.
- Check Insights and reports → Channel performance: how much money goes to the Display Network and YouTube, and for which “conversions”.
- Count purchases and forms, calls through call tracking, messengers through a bot with gclid, and for a business with an address — a separate campaign with local goals.
- Don’t delete the phone click — make it secondary, and give the campaign two weeks.
You can read how we set up such campaigns in the Performance Max and local business advertising sections.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we’ll look at your account and tell you where your budget goes by channel and what currently counts as a lead.