Question from Reddit user:
One of the biggest headaches I’ve had is explaining conversion lag to clients. Just last week, a client asked why Google Ads was showing fewer conversions than their internal CRM for the same period. I walked them through attribution windows and explained how conversions can show up days later, but they still weren’t convinced.
It feels like every reporting call turns into me defending the numbers instead of talking strategy. I even tried pulling data from GA4, but that just confused them more because the numbers didn’t line up perfectly.
How do you guys handle this? Do you set expectations early, or just let the data catch up before reporting?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Your headache is entirely common because Google Ads uses the conversion time for reporting, while your client’s CRM uses the transaction time, and the discrepancy is conversion lag.
The most effective way to handle this with clients is to shift your reporting window to exclude the last three to seven days, depending on your typical lag period, and to explicitly label the difference as “Estimated” versus “Final” data.
However, the best long-term solution to align your data and stop defending the numbers is to build a custom reporting dashboard that harmonizes the data sources using the Google Ads API and the Google Analytics Data API.
This allows you to pull both platforms’ data, apply the same attribution logic, and display a single, unified number for conversions in a visualization tool like Looker Studio.
The long answer is:
Your situation where you are defending the numbers instead of discussing strategy is the classic sign that you need to take control of the reporting environment instead of relying on the native interfaces.
The reason your Google Ads numbers are lower than the CRM’s is that Google Ads attributes a conversion based on when the original click happened, but reports it based on when the conversion event itself occurred, even if that happens days later.
Your client’s CRM, however, reports the conversion based on when the final transaction or lead creation was logged.
To fix this fundamentally, you need to stop showing raw interface screenshots and build a unified, transparent reporting solution.
This starts with leveraging the Google Ads API and the Google Analytics Data API to pull conversion data directly from both sources.
This is an excellent and cost-effective solution because it bypasses the different attribution defaults and reporting windows of each platform.
You can pull the data into a central warehouse or spreadsheet and then use the Looker Studio API to create a custom dashboard that visualizes the data.
Crucially, you can use a custom data column to display conversions based on Click Date instead of Conversion Date, which is a key reporting feature available through the Ads API, to show clients the value of the spend on the day it was spent, eliminating lag-related fluctuations.
Furthermore, implementing a server-side tagging solution using Google Tag Manager and a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform allows you to enforce consistent logic.
You can use this server environment to clean the data, apply a consistent user identifier across your website and your CRM, and then send a single, authoritative conversion event to both Google Ads and GA4, minimizing the inherent discrepancies between the two platforms and providing you with a single, defensible set of numbers to present to your client.
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