A website can be beautiful and fast, but advertising without the services connected to it works blind. It doesn’t know who left an enquiry, and you don’t know which ad brought them in. You are the one paying, so these things should belong to you, not to a contractor who may leave.
Below are six items: five basic ones and a sixth that depends on your business. For each: what it is in plain words, what you risk without it, what to ask and where to check. We checked the descriptions of the services against Google and Meta documentation on 7 October 2026. Menu names follow Google’s English help; depending on the interface version they may differ slightly.
The check takes about five minutes. You don’t need to set anything up: just open each service with your own email and see whether it is there.
1. Google Tag Manager
What it is. According to Google’s help, it is a tag management system: it lets you add and change counters and other “tags” on your site without changing the site’s code. Put simply, a “remote control” through which all counters are connected without a programmer: a marketer adds a counter here instead of asking a developer to edit code.
What it risks if it is missing or belongs to someone else. Every change has to be ordered from a programmer, which costs days and money. Worse, if the Tag Manager container was created under a former contractor’s personal email: you can’t see which counters are on your site and can’t change them.
Ask: do we have it? Which email is it registered to, and do I have access?
Where to look. Open tagmanager.google.com with your own email. If the container isn’t in the list, it isn’t registered to you.
2. Google Analytics 4
What it is. A service that shows where people come from and what they do on your site. The most important thing in it isn’t visits but “key events”: that is what Google’s help calls actions that are particularly important to the success of your business, such as a submitted form or a purchase. Any event you collect can be marked as a key event.
What it risks. If Analytics counts only page views, you can see people visit the site but not whether that brings enquiries. Then the ads are judged “by eye”.
Ask: can we see enquiries and purchases in it, not just visits? Which events are marked as key events?
Where to look. Open analytics.google.com. See whether any of the events corresponds to a submitted form and whether it is marked as a key event. If not, nobody is counting your enquiries. How we set this up is described on a separate page about web analytics.
3. Google Search Console
What it is. According to Google’s help, it is a free service that helps you monitor your site’s presence in Google Search results. It shows which queries bring people to you and how often they click, whether Google can see your pages, and whether there are crawling or security problems.
What it risks. Without it you don’t know whether a new page has reached search, and you learn about a technical problem only when enquiries have already dropped.
Ask: is the site verified in Search Console? Under which email?
Where to look. search.google.com/search-console with your own email. If your site isn’t there, it isn’t verified.
4. Meta Pixel
What it is. A snippet of code that, according to Meta’s developer documentation, tracks visitor activity on your website. It is needed to measure conversions in Ads Manager and to build audiences for ad targeting.
What it risks. You need it only if you advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Without it the ads don’t know who left an enquiry, so they optimise delivery blind, and you don’t see the real results. If you don’t run such ads, you can skip this item.
Ask: is the pixel installed on the site? Does the “enquiry” event fire after the form is submitted, not when the page opens?
Where to look. According to Meta, pixel results appear in Ads Manager. If they aren’t there while ads are running, ask your contractor. Note that in EU countries the pixel should run only after the visitor’s consent (see item 6).
5. Enquiry tracking in Google Ads
What it is. Google’s help describes a conversion as a valuable action after someone interacts with your ad: a purchase, a sign-up, a phone call. The ads should know about every submitted form and every call. And be linked to Analytics: then key events from Analytics can be used to create conversions in Google Ads.
What it risks. Without this, automatic bidding strategies learn not from your customers but from clicks. Or from false “enquiries”: a click on the phone button was counted as a contact, but the person never got through. We wrote about duplicates and false conversions in the article on three checks.
Ask: what exactly counts as an enquiry for us? Is Google Ads linked to Analytics?
Where to look. In Google Ads: Goals → Conversions. You can see each action and its status there. According to the help, the status “No recent conversions” means Google can see the tag but hasn’t recorded any conversions in the last seven days: a reason to investigate. The link with Analytics: in Analytics, Admin → Product links → Google Ads links.
6. Three more things, depending on your business
Google Business Profile. Free; according to Google’s help, it shows your business in local results on Maps and Search. You need it if customers look for you nearby: a car service, a salon, a clinic, a café. Ask: is the profile verified, and under which email?
Merchant Center. A free Google tool where you upload product data so the products can appear in Search, Maps and YouTube. You need it if you run an online shop. How it relates to shop advertising is explained in our sections on Shopping and Merchant Center.
Cookie consent banner. You need it if your visitors include people from the European Economic Area, the UK or Switzerland. Under Google’s EU user consent policy, you must obtain consent from such visitors for cookies and for the use of personal data to personalise ads, and keep records of consent. Otherwise Google may suspend the products. This is not legal advice: discuss your own case with a lawyer.
Three traps worth knowing about
A counter installed twice. Analytics can be connected in several ways: through a site plugin, with code on the page, or through Tag Manager. If two of them are combined, the same counter fires twice, and visits and events are double what they really are. Ask your contractor which way Analytics is connected. There should be only one.
The numbers in Google Ads, Analytics and your own enquiry sheet don’t match. That is almost always normal. Google Ads files a conversion under the day of the ad click, while Analytics files it under the day the person actually left the enquiry. Click on Monday, buy on Thursday, and the two systems record it on different days. They also decide differently which channel “owns” the customer. Practitioners give different answers on how large a gap is normal: when comparing ads with a CRM or a shop’s admin panel, from 10-15% to 5-15%, and for B2B one source advises measuring your own gap over the first month, because it can reach 10-50%. These are practitioners’ opinions, not statistics. Google’s official help gives no acceptable percentage: it only says that discrepancies occur even with a correct setup and explains the reasons (a different date, a different way of counting, invalid clicks filtered out). A large, steady gap is what should worry you: then look for broken tracking. And don’t draw conclusions from yesterday’s numbers, because conversions keep arriving for a few days.
The wrong time zone and currency in Analytics. They are set when the “property” is created (Analytics’ name for your site with all its settings). If it is set to, say, a US time zone, orders land on a different day. And a foreign currency is converted at Google’s internal rate, so the amounts drift away from your own books. Check in the property settings that your time zone and currency are there.
Summary: six questions for your contractor
- Do we have Google Tag Manager, and under which email is it registered?
- Can we see enquiries and purchases in Analytics, not just visits?
- Is the site verified in Search Console?
- If we advertise on Facebook and Instagram, is the Meta Pixel installed and does it fire on an enquiry?
- What counts as a conversion in Google Ads, and is the account linked to Analytics?
- Do we have a Google Business Profile, Merchant Center (for a shop) and a consent banner (if we have customers from the EU)?
“I don’t know” is also an answer. And the main rule is this: all accounts should be registered under your email, and your contractor gets access to them. Then, if they leave, you lose nothing.
You can read how we set up advertising in the search advertising and Performance Max sections. If you want to check the website itself, we have a separate website audit.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account and tell you which of these is connected correctly and what is worth fixing.