Over reporting conversions with Shopping ads?
It’s reporting 5 conversions recently but I don’t think it’s accurate, the only orders I’ve had recently haven’t shown the source as Google ads in the conversions data.
I’m not sure how to see exactly which items are supposed to have been sold in Google ads? Is it in the goals section?
Looks like my tracking cookies might be messed up? Theres some duplicates, any ideas how to tidy this up?
Eg, There is Google shopping App purchase, then Google shopping App purchase (1).
I’ve tried the tag assistant but don’t really understand what’s going on there.
The short answer is:
The discrepancy and duplicate conversion actions like “Google shopping App purchase (1)” strongly suggest a client-side tracking error where the Google conversion tag is firing multiple times, often due to tag misconfiguration or incorrect cookie handling, leading to over-reporting.
To fix this and provide reliable, non-duplicated data, you should implement server-side tracking via Google Tag Manager (GTM) paired with a service like Stape running on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) server.
This setup allows you to deduplicate events before they’re sent to Google Ads, resolving the overcounting.
Furthermore, you can use the Google Ads API to fetch granular click-to-conversion data and the Google Analytics Data API to compare your Google Ads data with your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) order data, providing a clear audit trail to match sales to their true source, addressing your concern about missing Google Ads sources.
The long answer is:
The core problem is the over-reporting and the creation of duplicate conversion actions, which is a classic symptom of the Google Ads conversion tag (or Google tag) firing repeatedly on the confirmation page, likely once directly and once again perhaps via an embedded snippet or a faulty trigger condition in a tag management system.
Client-side browser-based tracking, which relies on cookies, is inherently susceptible to these issues, along with ad blockers and browser restrictions, which can cause both under and over-counting.
The technical and cost-effective solution is migrating your Google Ads conversion tracking to a server-side architecture.
This involves setting up a Server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) container, typically provisioned on a service like Stape or directly within a robust cloud environment like Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
The flow is simple yet powerful: instead of sending data directly from the user’s browser to Google Ads, the browser sends a single, first-party cookie-enabled data stream to your sGTM endpoint.
Within the sGTM container, you process this data.
Crucially, you can implement logic to deduplicate conversion events based on a unique transaction ID or a similar unique identifier, ensuring Google Ads only ever receives one conversion event per actual order.
This dramatically increases data accuracy and fixes the over-reporting and duplicate conversion action issue without altering your site’s checkout code significantly, making it incredibly cost-effective compared to custom backend development.
To solve your auditing and data source concerns, you should leverage two specific Google APIs.
The Google Ads API allows you to programmatically pull detailed reports, which can include specific gclid (Google Click Identifier) data that links the ad click directly to the conversion event, helping you trace which Shopping ad click resulted in the order.
Simultaneously, you should ensure your Google Analytics 4 setup is robust, as the Google Analytics Data API can be used to extract your actual ecommerce transaction data, including the source and medium, into a tool like BigQuery or Looker Studio.
Integrating GA4 with BigQuery via the BigQuery API is an excellent approach because it allows for raw data export, enabling you to perform detailed SQL queries to join and compare your Google Ads conversion data with the precise order details and sources recorded by your storefront, directly addressing your inability to see which items were sold and verifying the reported source accuracy.
This comparison is the definitive method for reconciling the reported five conversions with your actual order data and determining the true source of each sale.
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