A new pattern showed up in our SME client sales call data through 2025. Booked calls were holding steady. Close rate was dropping. Sales teams were reporting the same complaint across categories. The buyers showing up to calls felt different. Less informed. Less prepared. Sometimes outright confused about what they had booked. Some of them turned out not to be the actual decision maker. A few admitted they hadn’t booked the call themselves. The pattern had a name once we tracked it. AI agents were booking sales calls on behalf of buyers. The leads being sent through agent-bookings were converting at roughly half the rate of buyer-booked calls. The trend is small now. It’s growing fast. By 2027 a meaningful share of every B2B and high-consideration B2C call your sales team takes will be agent-booked. This guide explains what’s happening, how to spot agent-booked calls, and how to qualify them differently so your close rate stays healthy. What’s Actually Happening ChatGPT , Claude, Gemin...
Your Google Ads dashboard says you got 47 conversions last month at a £38 cost per acquisition. Healthy numbers. Smart Bidding is dialled in. You’re celebrating. Then your sales team tells you that 12 of those 47 leads were spam, 8 were tyre kickers and 6 were friends-and-family. Of the 21 that were real, 4 became customers. Your real cost per customer was not £38. It was £447. And Google’s algorithm has spent the last three months optimising your campaigns to deliver more of the wrong people. This is the single most expensive conversion tracking mistake in SME Google Ads. It’s the gap between what Google counts as a conversion and what your business actually closes. The mistake costs the average SME advertiser around £4,000 a month in wasted ad spend, optimising against the wrong number. This guide explains why this happens, how Smart Bidding actively makes it worse, and the offline conversion tracking setup that fixes it. What’s Actually Being Tracked In Most SME Google Ads Account...