Why does Google Ads show more conversions than I actually have inquiries?

Google Ads usually shows more conversions than inquiries because it counts actions, not people: clicks on your phone number or e-mail address, a tag that fires when someone presses “Send” instead of when the form succeeds, or conversion actions that count every event. Google also reports conversions on the date of the ad click and includes modelled ones, so even a clean setup never matches your CRM line by line.

A moderate gap is normal: Google says differences of often up to 20 % between platforms are expected because of different attribution models. A factor of two or more almost always means the setup counts the wrong thing. For GA4, read why GA4 and Google Ads numbers differ.

Why does Google Ads show more conversions than inquiries?

• Micro conversions set as primary. Only primary actions go into the Conversions column and into bidding; secondary actions appear only under All conversions (Google Ads Help). If e-mail clicks, phone-number clicks or page views are primary, each one is a conversion.
• “Every” instead of “One”. With Every, each action after an ad click counts; with One, only one per click. Every is the default for website actions, yet Google recommends One for leads (counting options).
• Tag on the wrong trigger. A tag on the button click also counts failed submissions; two tags for one action double the count.
• Click date, not inquiry date. The standard columns assign conversions to the day of the ad click, and they can arrive up to 90 days later, depending on the conversion window. Your CRM logs the day of the inquiry.
• Modelled conversions. The Conversions column contains observed and modelled conversions, for example for visitors who declined cookies or switched devices. View-through conversions, by contrast, stay out of that column except in a few campaign types such as Demand Gen.
• Attribution. Data-driven attribution, the default for most actions, splits credit between ads, so campaign figures can contain fractions.

Case 1: What happens when the tag fires on the “Send” click?

A retail client’s account reported 1,040 contact-form conversions in 30 days. GA4 counted 345 successful form submissions in 28 days, across all channels. The Ads tag fired on the “Send” click, the GA4 tag only on the success message, so every invalid attempt counted for Ads. With a fixed value of €50 per form, Smart Bidding saw €52,000 of value that did not exist.

We moved the Ads tag to the success trigger on 17 July 2026. Form conversions in Ads fell from 40.7 to 18.3 a day, an over-count of about 2.2×. GA4 stayed flat at 14.6 and 15.0 successful forms a day, so no real inquiry was lost. The side effect: in the first days the account CPA rose from €12.3 to €23.6 with spend unchanged, and target CPAs set on the old count were suddenly too strict. We recommended raising them by a factor of 1.7 to 1.9.

Case 2: How did 907 conversions turn out to be 24 real leads?

A B2B client ran a Performance Max campaign from January to June 2025: €10,916 spend, 907 conversions. 810 of them were e-mail clicks, counted with Every at the time; only 22 were contact forms and 2 were calls. That is about €450 per real lead, and the client complained about spammy contacts. We switched e-mail and call clicks to One and left Performance Max paused. One guardrail from the same account: while e-mail clicks were secondary, the account had only 19 biddable conversions in 90 days and spend fell from €150 to €30 a day. We made e-mail clicks primary again, counted once per click.

A second retail client had its contact tag on the phone-click trigger: every tap on the number produced two conversions until we paused the duplicate on 29 July 2026.

Google Ads or CRM: which number should you trust?

For revenue and lead quality, trust your CRM. For bidding, Google Ads matters, but only if it counts what you want more of. To compare fairly:

1. Compare one conversion action, such as the contact form, with the inquiries your CRM attributes to paid search, not with all channels.
2. Add the column All conv. (by conv. time). Google suggests it for comparisons with your own systems because it uses the conversion date.
3. Leave out the most recent weeks; late conversions still fill them in.
4. Segment the table by conversion action to see which action inflates the total.

How do you clean up your conversion setup?

1. Open Goals → Conversions → Summary, click Edit goal and set e-mail clicks, phone-number clicks and page views to Secondary (observe only), unless you bid on them on purpose. Custom goals bid on their actions even when these are secondary.
2. Open each lead action, click Edit settings → Count and choose One.
3. In Google Tag Manager Preview, confirm that the tag fires once, on the success message. Then send a real test inquiry.
4. After the fix, expect fewer conversions and a higher CPA. Adjust target CPA or ROAS instead of reversing the fix.

Make only real inquiries and sales primary: successful form submissions, qualified calls, purchases. Keep phone and e-mail clicks as secondary signals, counted once per click, unless your account has too few real leads for Smart Bidding. Compare Ads with your CRM once a month by conversion date and treat a gap well above 20 % as a tracking task.

Sources

• Google Ads Help: About primary and secondary conversion actions
• Google Ads Help: About conversion counting options
• Google Ads Help: Understand your conversion tracking data

Not sure what your account really counts? We audit your conversion actions, tags and counting settings and align Google Ads with your actual inquiries. Book a free initial call or see how we handle Google Ads and conversion tracking for our clients.