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Why does Google Ads show more conversions than Google Analytics 4?

There are several reasons why your Google Ads conversion count can be significantly higher than what you see in Google Analytics 4. In this article we’ll focus particularly on Enhanced conversions for Google Ads and why they differ from GA4 because that is the technology used by Littledata to send conversions to Google Ads.

What are Google Ads Enhanced Conversions?​

Before we start let’s quickly go through the way Google Ads Enhanced conversions work (it’s important for understanding the difference from GA4!):

Every time a user clicks on your Google ad, the clickID is paired with their email address they used to log in on Google platform (browser, gmail, android, youtube… etc). If that email address happens to buy from you in the future - that ad gets a piece of the credit for the conversion.

It’s important to note that the email address or any other data collected is hashed - which means that it’s anonymized before being sent to Google!

Why Google Ads Enhanced conversions show higher event count than GA4?​

Now that we understand how Google Ads Enhanced conversions work, we can list the reasons for seeing discrepancies between Google Ads and Google Analytics 4 conversions - sorted by priority:

  1. Attribution model - as we explained above, a user can see your Youtube ad (without even clicking, literally just see it!) while logged into Google, and if they buy in the future via direct or social, email or any other non-google visit, the ad will get a portion of that conversion in Google ads, but NOT in GA4. The “portion” - deals with the fact that each conversion potentially has multiple touchpoints before the purchase, so each interaction with your ad deserves a portion of credit. Google, being the dominant organic search player, also includes organic data into this “equation” in GA4.

  2. Consent - Google Analytics 4 needs approval from visitors to tie their source of traffic with the purchase, whereas with Google Ads Enhanced Conversions this “tie” links hashed email on Google platform to hashed email in your store conversion and awards clickID connected to the former, i.e. the proper ad that caused that clickID to happen.

  3. Attribution window - Long after a campaign is turned off, the clickID will persist, to be precise if the attribution window is 90 days (which is Google Ads default)

  4. Switched devices - imagine a visitor clicked one of your ads on mobile, but bought on desktop. Or the other way around.. Or any other combination of devices - as long as the email used for Google login is consistent AND that email is on the order.

Apart from these expected reasons there are also negative examples how technical misconfigurations can cause increased Google Ads conversion count.

Why GA4 can show lower conversion count than Google Ads Enhanced conversions?​

While there are many reasons for GA4 to under-count google/cpc conversions, the case where this is completely Google Ads’ fault is duplicated Google Ads conversions - you might have two routes sending same conversions twice into the same Google Account.

The reasons why GA4 could report lower conversion count can be:

  1. GCLID stripped - due to various privacy protection methods (which we’re not gonna go into!) this parameter that is automatically added to the URL of a clicked Google ad might get stripped, and it’s the GA4 primary source of information about ads. There’s a workaround to put utm parameters on account level for

  2. Payment provider not excluded from referral list: a visitor may briefly abandon your website and “visit” paypal, stripe or similar payment provider site, then come back to the thank you page - GA4 might misunderstand that the visit comes from payment site domain

  3. If your store spans multiple domains (e.g shop(dot)com and checkout(dot)shop(dot)com), GA4 may lose the session source/medium data when the user moves between them, treating the purchase as a "Direct" visit while it actually came from google/cpc

  4. Landing page software (Shogun, Gem Pages etc) that accept your paid traffic but don’t have GA4 installed

  5. Thresholding - applies only if you have too few conversions from Google Ads in a given timeframe. The official docs suggest that a conversion coming from a campaign with less than 30-50 events might get bundled with other alike traffic sources in order to avoid individual users. If on the top of your GA4 report a small orange warning icon says "Thresholding applied," some of your google/cpc data might be filtered out of view.

Conclusion​

It’s completely normal and quite often to see a higher number of ecommerce purchases in Google Ads than in Google Analytics 4 because the former tracking is way better at following customers through privacy blocks and across different devices. Enhanced Conversions tend to recover "lost" sales that GA4’s cookie-reliant model often misses due to privacy restrictions. However, it’s good to do health checks by making sure that your GA4 conversion deficit is not happening due to payment provider referral steals, landing page problems or any other issue listed in the second part of this article.

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