Last updated: 28 September 2026
Google Ads conversion tracking usually stops working for one of five reasons: a broken or missing tag (the status shows Misconfigured), duplicate conversion actions, a GTM trigger on the wrong page, the click ID (GCLID) lost at checkout or booking, or Consent Mode v2 set up wrong. This guide checks each one in that order, starting with the status Google shows you.
This page is about measurement. You have a measurement problem when your CRM, Shopify or booking system records sales that Google Ads doesn’t, when conversions drop to zero with no drop in real business, or when the numbers jump around for no reason.
If tracking is fine but you’re simply not getting enquiries, that’s a performance problem. Read why your Google Ads aren’t converting instead.
Don’t change bids or pause campaigns to make up for a tracking error. It makes performance worse, not better.
Quick diagnosis: symptom, test, fix
Start with the symptom you can see, run the one test that confirms it, then jump to the fix. Most broken setups show one of these seven patterns.
| What you see | Test that confirms it | Likely fix |
|---|---|---|
| Zero conversions, but your CRM shows sales or enquiries | Status in Goals > Summary, then Tag Assistant on the confirmation page | Restore or repair the tag (Step 1) |
| More conversions than real sales, and more than GA4 | Look for two actions counting the same event, or an imported GA4 key event alongside the Google Ads tag | One Primary action per event; set the rest to Secondary (Step 2) |
| Conversions on pages that aren’t a thank-you page | GTM Preview: does the tag fire on the homepage or product pages? | Tighten the trigger (Step 3) |
| Conversions fire on a test, but not after a real ad click | Click your own ad in an incognito window and complete the journey | Auto-tagging, Conversion Linker or parameter passthrough (Step 4) |
| A sudden drop after a cookie banner change | Check the default consent state in Tag Assistant before you accept | Fix Consent Mode defaults and updates (Step 5) |
| Bid strategy shows Misconfigured | Is the campaign’s conversion goal enabled with a Primary action? | Fix the goal, not the bid strategy (Step 1) |
| Google Ads, GA4 and CRM all disagree by a steady margin | Compare the same date range on conversion date, not click date | Often expected, not a fault (fault or normal difference?) |
Is this a tracking problem or a performance problem?
Tracking problem: Google Ads reports significantly fewer conversions than your CRM or backend for the same period. Performance problem: the numbers broadly align but ROAS is poor. Diagnosing these differently matters — changing campaign settings to fix a tracking problem makes performance worse, not better.
Pull your last 30 days of actual sales or leads from your CRM, Shopify, or booking system.
- Google Ads reports fewer than about 70% of the CRM sales you can trace to Google → treat it as a tracking problem and work through this guide. (That threshold is our rule of thumb, not a Google figure.)
- Google Ads reports broadly in line with CRM sales but performance is weak → campaign optimisation conversation, not a tracking conversation: the job of Google Ads management.
Adjusting campaign bids and budgets to compensate for inaccurate data is one of the most common — and most avoidable — ways to waste ad spend.
Step 1 — Check your conversion status: Misconfigured, Awaiting conversions and Needs attention
Open Goals > Summary in Google Ads and read the Status column. Anything other than Active needs checking before you touch bids or budgets. Google currently shows five statuses: Active, Needs attention, Misconfigured, Awaiting conversions and Removed.
Looking for “No recent conversions” or “Inactive”? Google renamed its conversion statuses in July 2026. No recent conversions is now Awaiting conversions, Inactive is now Misconfigured and Other is now Removed. Older help pages and screenshots, including some of Google’s own, still use the old names, along with “Unverified” and “Tag inactive”, which aren’t in the current list.
| Status | What it means | First thing to check |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Recording conversions as intended. | If numbers still look low against your CRM, go to Steps 2–5. |
| Needs attention | There are issues to fix, but conversions are still recording. | Hover over the status and open the details for Google’s suggested fix. |
| Misconfigured (was Inactive) | Conversions have stopped recording entirely, because of a setup error or a broken tag. | Is the tag still on your confirmation page? Test it with Tag Assistant (below). |
| Awaiting conversions (was No recent conversions) | Nothing recorded in the last 7 days. | Your CRM for the same 7 days. Real sales there means a tag fault. |
| Removed (was Other) | The action was deleted or archived and isn’t tracking. | Whether a campaign was bidding on it as a primary action. |
“Awaiting conversions” (formerly “No recent conversions”)
Awaiting conversions means Google hasn’t recorded a conversion for that action in the last 7 days. Google’s explanation is that the action was created less than 48 hours ago, your campaigns are paused, or there isn’t enough traffic to produce a conversion.
So check your CRM for the same 7 days. If Google Ads brought in sales or enquiries and Google recorded none, it isn’t a quiet week. Treat it as Misconfigured and test the tag.
“Misconfigured” (formerly “Inactive”)
Misconfigured means conversions have stopped recording entirely, because of a setup error or a broken tag. The usual culprits are a site or theme update that removed the tag, a thank-you page whose URL has changed, or a GTM container published without the conversion tag. Test the tag as below, then work through Step 3.
How to verify a conversion action in Google Ads
- Go to Goals > Summary and find the conversion action.
- Hover over its status and click Troubleshoot, then Continue.
- Enter the URL of the page where the conversion starts and click Connect. Tag Assistant opens your site.
- Complete the conversion yourself: submit the form, make the booking or place a test order.
- Return to Tag Assistant and click Finish. It reports whether the conversion tag fired.
How long before the status updates?
A new or repaired tag usually shows as verified within a few hours of first firing, or within about 10 minutes on accounts with many conversions an hour. Conversion reporting can take 3–24 hours to update. Awaiting conversions only clears once a real conversion records, so on a low-volume lead-gen account allow several days before you judge a fix.
Bid strategy “Misconfigured”
A bid strategy shows Misconfigured when a conversion-based strategy (Target CPA, Target ROAS or Maximise conversions) has no conversion action it can optimise towards. That’s a conversion-goal problem, not a bidding problem. For example, the campaign optimises for website conversions but none is enabled and set as a primary action.
The fix is in Goals, not in the bid strategy. Make sure the conversion action the campaign needs is enabled and set as Primary. The other documented cause is a Maximise strategy sharing a budget with campaigns on a different bid strategy.
Also check the Diagnostics tab at the top of Goals > Summary, and the Diagnostics view on each conversion action’s details page. Fix any warnings there before the manual checks below.
Step 2 — Find and remove duplicate conversion actions
Duplicate conversion actions occur when multiple tags track the same event — for example, one from a manually placed Google tag, one from GTM, and one from a WordPress plugin, all firing on the same thank-you page. Each duplicate multiplies your reported conversions and teaches Smart Bidding to optimise against inflated signals it cannot verify.
The key diagnostic pattern: your Google Ads conversion count is significantly higher than your CRM AND higher than GA4. That combination almost always indicates duplication.
How to identify duplicates: in Goals > Summary, look for multiple actions with the same URL match, same event name, or conversion counts that exceed your actual sales volume.
The fix: mark one conversion action as Primary. All others should be set to Secondary (observation only, no bidding impact) or removed entirely. Secondary actions do not influence Smart Bidding — only Primary actions do.
This is the second most common issue we see in new client accounts — particularly in WooCommerce and Shopify setups where a tracking plugin has been installed alongside an existing GTM container without removing the original hardcoded tag.
Imported GA4 key events counted twice
A common version of this is a purchase or lead tracked twice in two different ways: once by the Google Ads conversion tag, and again as a GA4 key event imported into Google Ads. If both are set to Primary, every sale counts twice and Smart Bidding learns from the inflated figure. Choose one source for each event. Most advertisers keep the Google Ads tag as Primary because it records conversions more directly, and set the GA4 import to Secondary so it stays visible for comparison.
Step 3 — Verify your GTM triggers fire on the correct pages
A conversion trigger set to “All Pages” fires your conversion tag on every page load — product pages, homepages, blog posts — not just your thank-you page. The result is phantom conversions that vastly overstate performance. Use GTM’s Preview mode to watch exactly which tags fire on each page.
Google Tag Manager Preview mode documentation covers how to run this check. In brief:
- Open GTM → Preview
- Enter your live site URL
- Navigate to your thank-you or order confirmation page
- Confirm the conversion tag fires there and only there
Common GTM trigger failures:
- Trigger set to “Page URL contains /thank” when the actual URL is
/order-confirmationor/booking-confirmed - Thank-you page is on a subdomain (e.g.
booking.yourdomain.com) not covered by the GTM container - Thank-you page URL changes depending on payment method — card goes to
/success, PayPal goes to/paypal-return
Five minutes in GTM Preview will confirm more than two hours of reading conversion reports.
Google Ads call conversion tracking not working
If calls aren’t showing as conversions, check which call conversion type you set up first. Google Ads has five: calls from ads, calls to a phone number on your website, clicks on a number on your mobile website, clicks on call ads and assets, and imported call conversions. “Clicks on a number on your mobile website” counts the tap, not the call.
- Call length. Only calls longer than the minimum call length you set count as a conversion. If most enquiry calls are short, a high minimum hides them.
- The forwarding number isn’t swapping in. Website calls are tracked through a Google forwarding number that replaces yours on the page. If the page no longer carries the snippet that does the swap, callers dial your real number and nothing is counted. Forwarding numbers can also change or be reassigned, so don’t hard-code one.
- Display Network. Call assets that target the Display Network don’t support Google forwarding numbers, so those calls can’t be tracked as conversions.
- Early media. A recorded message or ringback your phone system plays before answering is incompatible with Google Ads call tracking and can make answered calls show as missed.
Step 4 — Check for GCLID loss at checkout or booking handoff
GCLID loss occurs when a user clicks a Google ad, but the Google Click ID parameter — which attributes the eventual conversion to that click — is dropped before they convert. This happens when checkout or booking is hosted on a separate domain or third-party platform, breaking the cookie that carries the GCLID.
This is the most common cause of tracking failure for service businesses using third-party booking software — clinic systems, appointment platforms, booking engines — where the confirmation page is on a different domain or subdomain.
How to check: click a Google ad yourself (from an incognito browser), proceed through the entire booking or purchase flow, and check whether your conversion fires at the end. If it does not, GCLID loss is the likely cause.
The fixes:
- Auto-tagging must be on — verify under Google Ads Settings > Account Settings. Auto-tagging appends the GCLID to your URLs on click.
- Conversion Linker tag must be active in GTM — firing on all pages of your site, including any landing pages before the third-party handoff. Without this, the GCLID is not stored in a first-party cookie.
- Third-party platform passthrough — many booking and payment platforms (Cliniko, Acuity, SimplyBook, Stripe-hosted checkout) have a setting to pass URL parameters through to the confirmation page. Check the platform’s tracking documentation.
- If no access to the confirmation page at all — implement offline conversion import. Collect GCLIDs via a hidden form field or URL parameter on your landing page, match them to bookings in your CRM, and upload the matched file to Google Ads. Google’s conversion windows documentation covers compatible import formats.
If your bookings are handled by a third-party platform and you have never checked the GCLID handoff, this is almost certainly where your conversions are going missing.
Step 5 — Verify Consent Mode v2 is configured correctly
Consent Mode v2 is required for UK and EU advertisers. Without it, users who decline your cookie banner are a complete blind spot — no conversions recorded, no modelling, no Smart Bidding input from that segment. A partial setup throttles conversions rather than stopping them; Consent Mode v2 and Google Ads conversions explains why.
Google’s Consent Mode v2 documentation covers full setup requirements. The key things to check:
- Is a Google-certified Consent Management Platform (CMP) connected to your GTM container?
- Is the default consent state set to “denied” before user interaction?
- Are consent signals updating dynamically when users accept or decline?
- Is the Consent Mode tag firing on all pages, not just the cookie banner page?
The most common misconfiguration: a cookie banner exists and Consent Mode is partially implemented, but no default “denied” state has been set. Tags fire as if consent was granted regardless of user choice. This creates a legal compliance risk and corrupts your conversion data simultaneously.
With Consent Mode v2 correctly configured, Google models conversions from declined-consent users based on aggregate patterns from consenting users. That modelled data feeds into Smart Bidding, recovering a significant portion of the signal that would otherwise be lost.
Shopify: why Google Ads conversion tracking stops working
On Shopify, Google Ads tracking usually breaks at the checkout upgrade. Shopify has retired checkout.liquid and the “additional scripts” box on the Thank you and Order status pages, so a Google tag pasted there no longer fires once a store is upgraded. Google’s recommended fix is the Google & YouTube app.
- App or manual tag, not both. The Google & YouTube app tracks purchase, add to cart and checkout started by default. If a hand-placed tag or a GTM purchase tag is also live, each order is likely counted twice. Keep one source of purchase conversions as Primary and set the rest to Secondary or remove them (Step 2).
- Thank-you page changes. Anything that lived in checkout.liquid or additional scripts has to move to the app or to a custom pixel in Shopify’s customer events. After any checkout change, place a test order and confirm the purchase records.
- Duplicate purchase events. Customers revisit the Order status page, and it can fire again. Pass the order ID as the transaction ID so Google can discard the repeats.
- Consent mode. If your cookie banner isn’t passing consent through to the Google tag, visitors who decline or ignore the banner go unmeasured. See Step 5.
If the gap is still there after that, the store is losing data in the browser. See our guide to server-side tracking on Shopify.
Is it a tracking fault or a normal reporting difference?
Google Ads, GA4 and your CRM will never match exactly, even when tracking works. A steady gap that holds week after week usually comes from how each tool counts. A gap that appears suddenly, or grows, usually means something broke.
These differences are expected and don’t need fixing:
- Date of the click vs date of the sale. Google Ads reports a conversion against the day of the ad click. GA4 and your CRM record it on the day it happened. A sale on Monday from a click last Thursday lands in different weeks.
- Attribution. Google Ads counts conversions it can link to its own ads within the conversion window. GA4 shares credit across every channel the customer used, so paid search often gets less credit there.
- Modelled conversions. With Consent Mode, Google Ads can add estimated conversions for people who declined cookies. Your CRM only has the real ones.
- What gets counted. Your CRM may hold leads from every channel, plus spam and duplicates. Google Ads should only hold the ones from its ads.
Treat it as a fault when Google Ads falls well below your CRM for leads you know came from Google, when the gap opens suddenly after a site or banner change, or when Google Ads reports more conversions than you had sales. For the full explanation of why platforms disagree, read why Google Ads, Facebook and GA4 never match.
When you’ve checked all five and the gap persists
If all five steps pass and there is still a material gap between Google Ads conversions and your CRM sales, the tracking loss is happening at the browser level. Ad blockers and Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention are preventing the conversion tag from firing regardless of how correctly it is configured.
This is the signal to implement server-side tracking. See our guide on server-side tracking and what broken tracking costs you for a full explanation of what sGTM and Enhanced Conversions involve and what they recover.
Frequently asked questions
Work through Steps 1–4 in order. Most common causes: conversion action showing Misconfigured status (formerly Inactive), GCLID lost at a third-party checkout or booking platform, auto-tagging disabled, or conversion action marked as Secondary rather than Primary. The Diagnostics tab (Goals > Summary > Diagnostics) will flag the most common ones automatically.
Different attribution rules: Google Ads reports conversions against the date of the ad click, using a conversion window that defaults to 30 days for most actions, and can include modelled conversions from Consent Mode v2 estimates. GA4 uses data-driven attribution and distributes credit across all touchpoints — meaning Google Ads does not receive full credit for conversions where other channels were also involved. Some divergence is structural and expected.
Primary actions are used by Smart Bidding for optimisation — they are the signals the algorithm trains on. Secondary actions are tracked for observation only, with no bidding impact. A common misconfiguration is marking the wrong action as Primary (a page view or session start instead of a purchase), which causes Smart Bidding to optimise toward the wrong goal entirely.
Active means Google has seen the tag fire recently — it does not confirm 100% firing rate or zero GCLID loss. Active with low numbers relative to your CRM means the tag is firing some of the time but not all. Work through Step 3 (GTM trigger check) and Step 4 (GCLID loss at checkout handoff).
Two options. First: check whether the booking platform has a native Google Ads conversion tracking integration or a URL parameter passthrough setting — most major platforms (Acuity, Cliniko, SimplyBook) have one. Second: offline conversion import — collect GCLIDs from ad clicks via a hidden field on your landing page, match them to bookings in your system, and upload to Google Ads. More technical but works for any platform regardless of native support.
If you’ve worked through all five steps and the gap is still there, we’ll audit your tracking setup and find exactly what’s missing.
Get a free tracking audit →Bons & Frazer runs Google Ads management for UK businesses on a fixed monthly fee, with server-side tracking built in. You deal directly with the two founders, with no contracts and no account managers. Based in Norfolk? See Google Ads in Norwich.