Google Ads Conversion Tracking Audit: All Conversions Checklist

When I take over a Google Ads account, I don’t open the campaigns first. I open the conversion actions. However smart a bid strategy is, it optimizes exactly what you feed it: serve it a purchase counted twice and a phone number click dressed up as a sale, and it will dutifully go buy you more fake purchases. A serious Google Ads conversion tracking audit is the first hour of work on an account, not the last.

Good news: Google just made that hour a little less painful. A new “All conversions” tab puts into a single table the settings that used to be scattered between the Summary page and each action’s detail view. Less good news: the tab shows you the problems, it doesn’t flag them. This article gives you the checklist I use to read that table row by row, find what’s off, and fix it without derailing bidding.

The New Google Ads All Conversions Tab, in Short

Where to Find It, and the Fallback if Your Account Doesn’t Have It Yet

The tab was spotted by Thomas Eccel and confirmed by Search Engine Roundtable on October 28, 2026, then covered by Search Engine Land and ALM Corp in early November. You’ll find it under Goals, Conversions, All conversions. The rollout is gradual: if you don’t see it, use the old route, the conversions Summary page and then “View all conversion actions”. Same content, one extra click.

At the time of writing, Google hasn’t published a help page dedicated to this tab. What I describe comes from trade press and what you see on screen; the exact column list may vary between accounts.

What the table shows at a glance, action by action:

• tracking status;
• counting method (one or every);
• click-through and view-through conversion windows;
• whether the action is included in account-level goals;
• primary or secondary status;
• repeat rate and last conversion date;
• data-driven attribution eligibility, where it applies.

Conversions vs All Conversions: Two Columns, Two Scopes

Before auditing anything, you need to speak the interface’s language. The Google Ads help center is clear on this:

In other words, the gap between the two columns isn’t a bug: it’s the volume you observe without handing it to Smart Bidding. A big gap isn’t necessarily a problem. Things that aren’t sales or leads sitting in the Conversions column definitely are.

Preparing a Google Ads Conversion Tracking Audit: The Column Set to Save

First habit: don’t work with the default columns. Primary or secondary status in particular isn’t shown out of the box; you need to turn on the “Action optimization” column. Build an audit column set once and save it:

1. Action name, source (website, GA4 import, offline import, calls, app)
2. Action optimization (primary or secondary)
3. Tracking status
4. Count
5. Click-through window, view-through window
6. Included in account-level goals
7. Value (default, dynamic) and currency
8. Repeat rate, last conversion
9. Conversions and All conversions over 30 days

The table reads both ways, and that’s the whole point. A row gives you one action’s full setup. A column lets you compare one setting across every action: that’s where inconsistencies jump out.

The Audit Checklist, Action by Action

Tracking Status: Active, Needs Attention, Misconfigured

Google renamed its statuses this summer (Search Engine Roundtable, July 2026):

The classic trap: an “Awaiting conversions” action you ignore because “we just didn’t get a lead this week.” On an account that gets thirty a month, seven days at zero is a tag broken by the last release. For site-side diagnosis, Tag Assistant is still the baseline tool.

Primary vs Secondary Conversions: What Actually Drives Bidding

This is the most important question of the whole audit. A primary action feeds the Conversions column, so it feeds bidding. A secondary action is observed without influencing optimization (unless a campaign explicitly uses it as a goal). Google’s help center puts it in one line: only bottom-of-funnel actions should be primary.

What I regularly find set as primary that has no business being there:

• email or phone number clicks;
• “begin checkout” next to the purchase;
• a “thank you” page view from a newsletter form;
• actions imported from old GA properties (yes, still, in 2026).

Each of these micro-conversions teaches the algorithm that an email click is worth as much as a sale. Make them secondary: you keep them for analysis and remove them from optimization.

Counting Method: One vs Every

Google lets you count one conversion per ad interaction, or every conversion. The practical rule:

• Every for purchases: a customer who orders twice after the same click really did bring two baskets.
• One for leads: a prospect who fills in three forms is still one prospect.

A real takeover example: a “Quote request” action set to “every”, on a site where the form submits in two steps and prospects come back to finish their request. Repeat rate shown: 1.8. Translation: the account was reporting almost two leads for one. The reported CPA looked great; the real one, much less so. The repeat rate in the new tab is precisely the column that gives this away: on a lead action, anything above 1 needs an explanation.

Inconsistent Click-Through and View-Through Windows

The defaults, according to Google’s conversion windows help page: 30 days after a click, 1 day after an impression (3 days for engaged views). The click-through window can go up to 90 days depending on the conversion source.

The problem isn’t a long or short window, it’s an inconsistent one. Example: purchase at 30 days, but add to cart, set as primary, at 90 days. You’re giving bidding a micro-conversion signal that stays open three times longer than the sale. Align windows with your actual decision cycle (your time-to-conversion data tells you what it is) and keep the same logic across comparable actions. If you’d rather reason from data than gut feeling, the method I describe to choose a GA4 conversion window with BigQuery works for Google Ads too.

Careful: changing a window only applies to future conversions. Nothing is recalculated retroactively, which breaks before/after comparisons for the full length of the window.

Duplicate Conversions: Google Ads Tag, GA4 Import and Offline Import on the Same Event

Here’s the most common double counting, and the most expensive. The site sends the purchase through the Google Ads conversion tag. Someone, at some point, also imported the GA4 purchase key event. Both actions are primary.

Let’s run a month: 400 real orders. The Google Ads tag sees 380, the GA4 import sees 340 (consent, import delay). Bidding sees 720 conversions. Your reported ROAS nearly doubles, and Smart Bidding overbids with full confidence on a false signal.

In the tab, detection is simple: sort by name or category and look for two primary actions describing the same business event from different sources. Keep only one as primary (usually the Google Ads tag, strengthened with server-side enhanced conversions) and make the other secondary for cross-checking. Same logic for an offline import of CRM sales that duplicates a lead already counted online: decide which one drives. Since November 2026, a new source of duplicates has appeared: the same pipeline activated in both Google Ads and the new Google Analytics Data Manager.

Values: Fixed, Dynamic, Currency

Last pass on the value columns. What I check:

• the purchase sends a dynamic value, not the default value of 1 set at creation;
• leads have consistent fixed values (a quote request isn’t worth the same as a sign-up) if you bid on value;
• the action’s currency matches the site’s (a euro site reporting in dollars does happen);
• values are with or without tax, and the same rule applies everywhere.

Typical Inconsistencies in an Account Inherited From an Agency

On the accounts I audit, the same patterns keep coming back. This table is my quick reading grid:

The logic is the same as for a GA4 audit: most errors don’t come from one bad decision, but from an accumulation of reasonable decisions made at different times by different people.

Fixing Things Without Breaking Bid Strategy Learning

Changing an action’s primary status changes what bid strategies see. It’s not a harmless toggle, and there’s a clean way to do it.

1. Fix what’s broken first. A Misconfigured primary action gets repaired before anything else: it is starving bidding of signal right now.
2. Batch your changes. One dated set of changes beats one fix a week for two months: every change triggers a new adjustment phase.
3. Annotate. Log the date and the detail in the account (and in your reporting). Three months from now, when someone asks why conversions dropped 40% on November 5, the answer “we stopped counting purchases twice” needs to be written down somewhere.
4. Warn people before the numbers move. Removing a duplicate mechanically lowers reported conversions and ROAS. That’s not a performance drop, it’s the end of an illusion. The client needs to hear it before they see it.
5. Don’t promise a specific learning period. Google’s help center no longer cites the old 50-conversion benchmark; it now talks about one to two conversion cycles, faster with more data. Monitor, don’t panic in week one.

One last word on Google’s own indicators. Data Strength Uplift will tell you your setup is recovering conversions; it will never tell you you’re counting them twice. The audit is your job.

Key Takeaways

The new All conversions tab doesn’t run the audit for you, but it removes the “it takes too long to check” excuse. Save your audit column set today and spend thirty minutes on it with three questions in mind: what is primary that shouldn’t be, what is counted twice, and which window or counting method stands out from the rest. With Black Friday a little over three weeks away, that’s probably the most profitable half hour of your month in Google Ads.