Either nothing is being recorded, or something is being recorded and you are reading a column that does not contain it, or it is being recorded against a date you are not looking at. The three have nothing in common except the empty cell you are staring at, and the account separates them for you: one status column, one report column, one calendar. Work through them in that order and most of these questions end within a few minutes.
Google's own check is Tag Assistant: connect it to your website, trigger the conversion action the way a customer would, then close it and refresh the conversions page. Verified actions first appear as No recent conversions, and the status changes to Recording once the page actually receives conversions; Google notes that actions verified in a debug session update in the account after about 30 minutes. Before that, confirm the obvious: that the tag sits on the page that confirms the action rather than on the form page, and that the conversion ID and label in the snippet match the action you are looking at.
A thank-you page that visitors can reach without converting will over-report; one they never reach will report nothing
Values with currency symbols or commas, and quotation marks pasted from a text editor, are the usual reasons a snippet silently fails
A site change that nobody connected to advertising — a new checkout, a moved confirmation page — is the most common cause of a tag that stopped
Google Ads reports conversions only when there are ad interactions from that same Google Ads account. A sale that came from organic search, a newsletter or direct traffic is a real sale that your shop and your analytics will both show, and Google Ads will not — there is no click of its own to attribute it to. So before suspecting the tag, check that the campaigns were actually running and getting clicks in the period you are looking at. If they were not, the empty column is arithmetic, not a fault, and the question moves to why the ads are not showing.
The Conversions column counts your primary conversion actions. A secondary action is reported in All conversions and is not used for bidding, even when the goal it belongs to is used for bidding — so an action set as secondary is invisible in the column most people look at. The counting setting changes the number too: Every counts every conversion after an ad interaction, which suits sales, while One counts a single conversion per ad click, which suits leads. Google notes that a change to the counting setting applies only to future reporting, so it will not repair the history you are comparing against.
Google Ads reports conversions on the ad interaction date; other reporting tools attribute them to the conversion date. That single difference explains most arguments between two dashboards, and it also explains why last week's numbers keep rising: a conversion window is the period after an ad interaction during which a conversion is recorded, the click-through window defaults to 30 days and can run from 1 to 90, engaged-view defaults to 3 days and view-through to 1. A purchase today can still land on a click from three weeks ago. Judge a period only after its window has had time to close.
Beyond the attribution date, Google asks for 24 to 48 hours of synchronisation before comparing Google Ads with Analytics at all, and says it can take up to 7 days for conversion data to appear fully after significant changes or a new account link. Other tools also record traffic that Google Ads later classifies as invalid, and cross-device conversions are modelled rather than observed. Two numbers that differ by a few percent are two definitions, not a defect; a number that is zero on one side is a defect. Our conversion tracking guide covers how to set the measurement up so there is one source of truth to begin with.
Read the conversion action status; check that the campaigns had clicks in the period; check whether the action is primary and how it is counted; then check the dates and the conversion window before comparing anything to another tool. Only if all four are clean does it make sense to open the tag itself. And when a conversion-based bid strategy has nothing usable to optimise toward, the campaign reacts long before you notice the empty column — which is one of the first things our guide to a campaign that will not spend asks you to check.
Accuracy check: reviewed against current Google Ads Help documentation on 28 September 2026.
Google says Unverified means the conversion tracking tag associated with that action has not yet fired. It is normal for a few hours after setup; beyond that, confirm the tag is on the page that actually confirms the action, and use Tag Assistant to trigger the action and watch it fire.
Google Ads only reports conversions when there are ad interactions from that same Google Ads account. A sale from organic search or direct traffic is a real sale, but Google Ads has no click to attribute it to, so it never appears there.
The Conversions column counts your primary conversion actions. A secondary action is reported in All conversions instead and is not used for bidding, even when the goal it belongs to is. Check whether the action is primary before assuming the tag is broken.
No. Google Ads reports a conversion on the date of the ad interaction, while other tools attribute it to the date the conversion happened. With a default 30-day click-through window, a click from three weeks ago can still add a conversion to that older day, so recent days keep filling in.
Google says conversion tracking reporting can take 3 to 24 hours to update, and that comparisons with Analytics need 24 to 48 hours for data to synchronise. After a significant change or a new account link, allow more. Check the status column first; it changes faster than the numbers.
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