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Your ads report more leads than you can find. Where the numbers usually disagree.

The ad account says conversions are happening. Your inbox, your calendar, or your order list says fewer. Neither number is lying; they are counting different things, on different clocks, and sometimes one of them is counting wrong. Here is where the gap usually comes from, and how to find yours in about ten minutes.

First, what a "conversion" actually is

An inquiry is a message that arrived. A conversion is a tag on your website telling Google that something happened. Those are two separate systems, and each one can fail on its own. The inbox can miss a lead the tag counted (the form submitted, the email never sent). The tag can count something the inbox never saw (a bot filled in the form). And the tag can count one real lead twice. When the numbers disagree, you are looking at one of a small number of causes.

Counting one lead more than once

  • The count setting. Every Google Ads conversion action counts either "one" per click or "every" time. For leads it should be one. Set to every, one customer who submits twice, or reloads the thank-you page, counts twice.
  • Two conversion actions for the same submit. A Google Ads tag on the thank-you page, plus a Google Analytics event imported into Google Ads, both marked as primary. One real lead, two conversions in the column you look at.
  • A thank-you page anyone can reload. If the conversion fires on a page view, the back button and a refresh fire it again.

Counting things that aren't leads

  • Spam submissions. A bot that fills in your form fires the tag exactly like a customer does. The inbox filters the junk; the conversion count doesn't.
  • A tag that fires on the wrong thing. A "button click" conversion set up on a busy site can fire on any button, not the submit. A page-view conversion on a thank-you page that people can reach without submitting counts visits, not leads.
  • Test submissions. Yours, your web designer's, your staff's. Unless internal traffic is excluded, they all count.

Counting on a different clock

Google Ads reports a conversion on the date of the click that led to it, not the date the form was sent. A customer who clicked your ad two weeks ago and inquired today shows up two weeks back in the report. If you compare this week's ad conversions to this week's inbox, they will not match even when everything is working. Compare a whole month, and give it a few days to settle.

The other direction: fewer conversions than inquiries

  • The tag never sees the submit. Many forms show an inline "thanks" message without loading a new page. A conversion set up on a thank-you page URL never fires.
  • The cookie banner blocks it. When a visitor declines cookies and consent is not passed through properly, the tag stays silent. The lead arrives; the count doesn't.
  • The conversion action is inactive. Google Ads marks each conversion action with a status. "Inactive," "unverified," or "tag inactive" means it is not counting anything.
  • The event isn't marked as a conversion. Google Analytics may record the form event and still not treat it as a key event, so it never reaches the reports or the ad account.

The ten-minute check

  1. Send yourself a test inquiry from your phone, on cellular, not the office connection.
  2. Open Google Analytics, then Reports, then Realtime. Within a minute you should see the form event. If you don't, the tag isn't seeing the submit.
  3. Open Google Ads, then Goals, then Conversions. Read the status column on each action, and the "count" column. Note anything set to "every" and anything marked primary more than once for the same thing.
  4. Count last month's inquiries in your inbox and compare them to last month's conversions in Google Ads. Expect some difference from timing alone. If the two numbers are far apart, or one is zero while the other keeps moving, one of the causes above is the likely reason.

If you found it and can't fix it

The check tells you which kind of break you have. Fixing it means changing the conversion action, the tag, or the form's thank-you behavior, in the right account, without breaking the counting that does work. If that isn't something you want to do yourself, it is exactly the failure the conversion tracking fix covers, at one flat fee, with the plan in writing before you pay anything.

See how the fix works