How do I check whether my Google Ads conversion tracking is accurate?
Audit in three layers: does the tag fire, does it fire exactly once, and does it fire for the right event. Most broken tracking passes the first layer and fails the second or third. Submit a real form, place a real call, then compare Google's count for that day against your CRM's count for the same day. Recheck that only intended actions are marked primary.
Layer one: does it fire at all
Load the site in a clean browser session, complete a real conversion, and watch the network requests for the conversion hit. Google's tag diagnostics and the conversion action's recent-activity status will corroborate, but they lag and they are not a substitute for seeing the request.
The usual layer-one failures are a consent banner blocking the tag until acceptance, a tag that never made it onto a newly built page, or a form plugin that redirects before the event fires.
Layer two: does it fire exactly once
This is where most accounts fail, and the symptom is a conversion count that looks great and does not match anything operational.
The classic causes: a thank-you page that counts on refresh or on a bookmark visit; a single-page application firing on route change and again on a back-navigation; and the most common of all, the same lead counted twice because both a native Google tag and an imported analytics event are active for the same action. Check the counting setting too — call and form conversions should generally count one per click, not every.
Layer three: is it the right event
A tag can fire once, correctly, for something that is not a lead. Contact page views, chat opens, PDF downloads and click-to-call taps all get marked primary in accounts nobody has reviewed.
Open the conversion actions list and read the primary column as a sentence: "I am telling Google to buy more of these." Anything that does not belong in that sentence goes to secondary, where it stays visible in reporting without steering bids. Getting this right matters more than any single bid change, for reasons covered in how conversion data drives bidding.
Make reconciliation a habit, not an event
An audit is a snapshot; tracking breaks silently and usually after a site change. The durable fix is a scheduled comparison: Google's daily conversion count against the count of leads created in your CRM for the same day, with an alert when the gap exceeds a tolerance you set.
That takes an integration pulling from both systems, and it converts tracking from something you discover is broken a month later into something that tells you the morning it breaks — which is precisely the job of a daily brief.
Topics: conversion tracking · auditing · duplicates · data quality
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