Say you run a roofing company in Tampa. You’re about to pay for clicks from people who need a roof repair. Before you turn the ads on, grab your phone and ask yourself for a quote.
Start on the page the ad will send people to. Fill in the form. Then put the phone down and go look for the request wherever it’s supposed to land. The whole thing takes a few minutes. It can also tell you where you’re about to spend money sending people into a dead end.
Start where the customer starts
Open the exact landing page on your phone. If the ad says roof repair in Tampa, can you see roof repair and Tampa without digging? Can you find the quote button with one thumb? Try the form with the keyboard open, too. That’s when a field or button you could see just fine on a laptop can get awkward.
Send a request with an email you can access. Put something easy to spot in the message, like “TEST — roof repair.” Check what the site says afterward. A simple “We got your request” gives the customer a reason to stop wondering whether they should hit Send again.
Find the request on your end
Now look where you’d actually see a new lead on a busy day. That might be your inbox, a shared mailbox, or the list of new jobs in your CRM. Open the request and try replying. Check that the reply goes to the address you typed into the form.
If the site says the message went through and you can’t find it, check spam and look for a saved entry in the form tool, if it keeps one. An entry with no email points you toward delivery or notification settings. If there’s no saved entry and you expected one, start with the form. Fix what you find and run the same test again.
Check what Google counts
Once the request makes it to you, check whether your tracking sees a completed inquiry. I’d use Google’s Tag Assistant to open a test session and submit the form again. Look for your lead conversion after the form succeeds. If it fires when you just open the page or press Send with a required field missing, you’re counting something that never reached you.
You don’t need to click your own ad for this. A debug session shows whether the tracking fires. The campaign report answers a different question later, once there’s an ad interaction to credit.
Run it again after the next change
Any time you swap a form, change who gets the emails, or rebuild the landing page, send another test. If I had five minutes before a campaign went live, this is where I’d spend them.
If the request disappears somewhere between the page and your inbox, that’s the kind of website fix I can help trace.