Guides · Audit methodology
Conversion Integrity: The Module That Invalidates Every Other Number If It Fails
Every bidding strategy, every budget decision, and every audit finding downstream of your conversion data is only as trustworthy as the tracking itself.
The problem
Automated bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions optimize toward whatever signal they're given — if that signal is inflated by duplicate firing, deflated by a broken tag, or simply absent because a conversion action was never verified, the algorithm optimizes a distorted target with total confidence. It has no way to know the input is wrong.
Why it happens
Conversion actions are typically set up once, early in an account's life, and rarely revisited — a site redesign, a checkout flow change, or a new analytics implementation can silently break a tag without triggering any alert, because Google Ads doesn't verify that a conversion action is receiving real, non-duplicated signal; it only reports what it receives.
How to detect it manually
In Google Ads, check each conversion action's status under Goals → Conversions — a status of 'Inactive' or 'Misconfigured' next to a conversion action that should be firing regularly is the clearest sign. Cross-reference against your actual sales or lead records for the same period: if 22 clicks and real revenue produced zero recorded conversions, the tracking — not the campaign — is the problem.
How AdStake evaluates it
Tracking integrity carries a 15% weight in the AdStake Assurance Standard™. Because AdStake works from your exported reports rather than live account access, this module flags where reported conversion volume looks inconsistent with spend and click patterns — a signal worth investigating directly in your ad platform's conversion action settings.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean if a conversion action shows 'Misconfigured' in Google Ads?
It means Google Ads has detected an issue with how that conversion action is set up or receiving data — commonly a manual/API-based event source that requires your site to actively send the conversion, rather than an automatic website tag.
Zero conversions despite real clicks and spend — is that always a tracking bug?
Not necessarily. It can also mean genuinely zero completed purchases occurred in that window — check your actual sales records (Stripe, CRM, order system) before assuming tracking is broken. Confirm real conversions exist, then verify they're being recorded.
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