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Google Has Fixed the Ads Conversion Reporting Bug (Mostly)

[ Back to News Page ] Dated: 27-Nov-2019

The recent Google Ads Conversion Reporting bug that caused many campaigns to show higher conversion rates has now been fixed. Mostly at least. Google has been working on a fix for this conversion reporting bug that may have caused businesses to think their business doing better than it actually is. However, it has since now been fixed for the most part and will be completely fixed pretty soon by the looks of things.

How and When Did It Happen

As our last news update highlighted, Google saw yet another bug in their system. This one was related to Google Ads Conversion reporting. It hit on November 20 at around 9:00 PM EST. There was an unfair rise in conversion rates for Google Ads campaigns shown between the dates of November 11 and November 20. Campaigns that weren’t using Last-Click Attribution saw the impact of this bug.

Other than showing a falsely bloated Google Ads Conversion Value, this bug didn’t do much. In its actual core, all things remained pretty consistent just they were reported at a false value. The bug also affected reporting only and not smart bidding algorithms according to Google.

Status of the Problem

This past Sunday, Google reported that the bug has now been fixed. All aspects of its impact were fixed except Keywordless Query, Keywordless Category Reports, Geo Performance, and Search Query Performance according to Google. This is good news for businesses running Google Ads Campaigns as they can now see their correct conversion values.

This status update is a sigh of relief for businesses and marketers. Ones who thought their campaigns to be doing better conversions than they actually were might have been caused to change the course of their campaigns.

Will It Come Back Again?

As far as bugs in Google’s algorithms go, they don’t have a history of repeating themselves often. These are coding errors or developments that might happen due to random events. Google has to fix them down to the coding basic. Once fixed, these can possibly not come back logically. Similar problems and developments can of course pop out at any particular given time.

Marketers and business owners need not to worry about this one again any time soon. They can also find respite in the fact that this bug only affected reporting and not the actual working of their campaigns. Fingers crossed that we don’t see anything of this nature any time in the future.

Why Should You Care?

Seeing false data of any sort is never good for any marketer or business owner. If you are not using the last-click attribution and also downloaded your conversion field data from Ads APIs or Google Ads Scripts between November 20 from 9 pm PST to November 24 9 am PST, your data should be affected by this bug. Best thing to do is to either look at data from previous periods or you can pull it out again now (after the 24th at 9 am PST).

Best thing to do is to wait a while further and delay data downloading until the problem gets resolved fully. However, as mentioned above, your actual campaigns should not be affected at all. Just their reporting saw an impact. Hopefully, it will all be fixed pretty soon.