Drivers Lab: the conversions that

Drivers Lab: the conversions that weren't conversions

Drivers Lab is a motorsport driver development group based in Dubai, with a simulator centre in Motor City, a racing driver management brand and two more businesses under the same roof. Four brands, one small team, and a founder, Dan Wells, who wanted one simple thing from his ads: to know what they bring in.

When I joined, the dashboards looked healthy. Google Ads was reporting form conversions every week. The problem was that the business wasn't seeing those forms.

I went through the tags one by one to find out why. On the driver management site, the "form submission" conversion was firing when someone clicked a link with the word "Apply", before they had typed a single letter. The reports were counting people who clicked a button, not people who enquired. On the main Drivers Lab site it was worse: the domain had been switched to a new website version, and that version had no tracking at all. For four weeks, every visitor from paid ads simply disappeared.

I rebuilt the setup in Google Tag Manager and GA4, tied conversions to the real form submissions, checked every reported number against the actual enquiries before putting it in a report, and only then went back to optimising Google Ads (Search and Performance Max). I also set up a daily agent that audits the accounts every morning, so a silent break like this gets caught in a day, not a month.

On the driver management brand, form enquiries grew 7.6x year on year.

The part I'm proudest of is what Dan wrote afterwards: "He'd rather give a conservative figure he can stand behind than an impressive one he can't. It means I can actually make decisions off his reporting."