The Growth ProjectWhat Google Ads Says vs What Your Orders Say
- 1.7×the sales Google Ads claimed, against what the store's own orders credited to ads
- 54%of orders came from ads, but only 32% of sales
- 2.9×the average order from free search, against an order from ads
- 63%of delivery shoppers left at the delivery step, against 18% choosing pickup
One ecommerce store, two weeks of its own order and checkout records after an ads rebuild.
Field note from an ecommerce store. Two weeks after we rebuilt their Google Ads account, the obvious next step looked like more ad budget. The store’s own order records said otherwise.
Three sources, three questions
We had three views of the same fortnight:
- Google Ads answers “which sales did an ad touch?”
- The store’s order records answer “how did the buyer arrive on the visit when they bought?” Each order saves its source at checkout.
- The checkout funnel answers “where did shoppers stop?”
Each one alone told a different story.
What the ad platform said
Google Ads reported about 1.7 times the sales that the store’s own records credited to ads. That isn’t an error. Google credits a sale to an ad if the customer clicked one at any point in the past few weeks, even if they came back later through a bookmark or a free search result. The store credits the visit the customer bought on. The true figure sits somewhere between the two, and without the store’s records there’s no way to see the gap.
What the orders said
| How the customer arrived | Share of orders | Share of sales | Average order vs ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Google search | 25% | 43% | about 2.9 times |
| Google Ads | 54% | 32% | (baseline) |
| Typed the address or a bookmark | 18% | 21% | about 2 times |
| AI assistants and other sites | 4% | 4% | about 1.7 times |
Ads brought the most orders, but the smallest. Free search brought fewer orders, nearly three times the size, and the biggest share of sales. Free search sales had also been growing month on month from SEO work, while the ads only showed in the business’s home region.
Where shoppers stopped
The checkout funnel, split by source, showed where the money was being lost:
- Shoppers from free search abandoned checkout far more often than ad shoppers, and their carts were about three times larger.
- Most shoppers who gave up were outside the area the business could quote delivery for.
- At the delivery step, 63% of delivery shoppers left, compared with 18% of shoppers choosing pickup.
What we did next
More ad spend would have bought more small, local orders. The biggest leak was large carts from free search, stopped at checkout by a missing delivery price. So the next project, the kind of fix our Checkout Leak Check finds, became delivery quotes: a customer without a delivery price can ask for one instead of leaving. Meanwhile ad spend was trimmed, not raised.
The lesson
- The ad platform tells you what Google touched.
- Your orders tell you where buyers came from.
- Your checkout tells you where they stopped.
You need all three to put the next dollar in the right place. Recording the source on every order is part of our tracking kit, and comparing it with the ad platform is the last step of every Google Ads audit.