Conversion tracking that automated bidding can trust

The situation

You run a campaign on Target CPA. Cost per conversion reads 40 lei, the report is green, but the phone does not ring more than before. You open the conversions column and find: "Thank-you page view" from Google Ads, "generate_lead" imported from GA4 and "Submit button click" — all three counting the same person. Automated bidding sees three conversions where there was one, and pays accordingly.

This is the most common problem in the accounts I have audited: not missing tracking, but tracking that says untrue things. The bidding system does not know you are lying. It optimises towards exactly what you feed it.

What a conversion action is

In Google Ads, a conversion action is the definition of one valuable thing that happens after a click: an order, a submitted form, a call, a booking. Each action has:

• A source — the Google tag directly on the site (via gtag or Google Tag Manager), an import from GA4, an offline import (from your CRM), calls, app actions.
• A goal — the category: Purchase, Submit lead form, Contact and so on. Goals group actions and decide what bidding uses at account or campaign level.
• Counting — "one" per click (for leads) or "every" (for orders).
• A conversion window — how long after the click a conversion is still attributed.
• A value — fixed, dynamic (order value) or none.

Primary vs secondary: the only setting that matters for bidding

Every action is marked primary or secondary.

• Primary = it enters the "Conversions" column and automated bidding optimises towards it.
• Secondary = it only shows in "All conversions". You see it, you analyse it, but bids ignore it.

Simple rule: primary is only what you would get paid for. The paid order. The submitted lead. The call over 60 seconds. Everything else — page views, button clicks, scrolls, add-to-carts — is secondary. Useful for diagnosis, but if you make them primary, the algorithm buys clicks from people who scroll, not people who buy.

Direct tag or GA4 import?

Both are legitimate. They differ in what they see and how fast.

My default for accounts that spend seriously: direct tag for primary actions, GA4 for analysis and possibly as secondary. If you use the GA4 import as primary, do not also put the direct tag for the same event on primary.

Enhanced conversions

Missing consent, ad blockers and Safari mean a share of conversions no longer connects to the click. Enhanced conversions for web send, together with the conversion, first-party data the user typed in themselves (email, phone), hashed on the device before it leaves. Google matches it against signed-in accounts and recovers conversions that would otherwise be lost.

For leads there is also enhanced conversions for leads: you take the email from the form, store it in your CRM, and when the lead becomes a customer you import it back into Google Ads. That way you bid on qualified leads, not on every submitted form — spam included.

Concretely: you enable the option in the conversion action, and in the tag (or in GTM) you configure the user-provided data variable, taken from the thank-you page or the form. In the EU all of this runs under Consent Mode v2 — the dedicated lesson explains how.

How to verify end to end

Do not trust the "Recording conversions" status. Run the full test, once:

1. Open Google Tag Assistant and connect the site. Walk the flow to the conversion and check that the conversion tag fires exactly once, with the right ID and label, with the right value.
2. Check that Conversion Linker (in GTM) or the equivalent setting is on, so the GCLID is stored on landing.
3. Click your own ad (one click, not ten) and complete the real action — a test form you will delete from the CRM.
4. Wait a few hours. In Google Ads, on the conversion action, the test conversion must appear — once, in one primary action.
5. Open the action's diagnostics tab: no tag warnings, no "no recent conversions", and for enhanced conversions, a status showing the data arrives.