Google Ads has replaced three vague conversion action statuses in its interface, retiring Inactive, No recent conversions and Other in favor of Misconfigured, Awaiting conversions and Removed. Advertisers troubleshooting stalled tracking no longer have to guess whether a red flag means a broken tag or a campaign that simply has not run long enough to register activity. The distinction sounds small. It changes what an advertiser does next.
Under the old system, a conversion action marked Inactive was described only as “isn’t working as intended,” a label that covered a dead tag, a misfired Tag Manager container, and a paused campaign under one red icon. No recent conversions meant zero recorded conversions in the past seven days, without saying whether that was a technical failure or an expected quiet period for a new or low-traffic campaign. Other functioned as a catchall for whatever did not fit the first four categories.
The new labels separate those causes. Misconfigured means conversions have stopped recording entirely because of a setup error or a broken tag, according to Google’s updated help documentation. Awaiting conversions means no conversions have posted in the last seven days, typically because the action was created less than 48 hours ago, the campaign is paused, or site traffic is currently too thin to trigger one. Removed marks an action that has been manually deleted or archived and is no longer tracking anything.
That split matters because Misconfigured and Awaiting conversions call for opposite responses. A Misconfigured flag means something is actively broken and needs an immediate tag audit: checking the Tag Manager container, the Enhanced Conversions setup, or the destination page for a script that never fires. An Awaiting conversions flag means the account manager should do nothing to the tracking code at all and instead look at budget, campaign status, or traffic volume. Under the old Inactive label, both situations produced the same red icon, which meant advertisers sometimes debugged a tag that was never broken, or sat on a genuinely dead pixel because they assumed it was still ramping up.
Search Engine Roundtable, in reporting by Barry Schwartz published July 13, said the updated wording was spotted by Natasha Kaurra and Saquib Syed, who each shared screenshots of the new statuses on LinkedIn before the change appeared in Google’s own troubleshooter documentation.
Google has not published a changelog entry, a rollout timeline, or any measurement of how often the old Inactive label led advertisers to the wrong fix. The update reads as a documentation and interface change rather than an announced product release, and Search Engine Roundtable’s report is based on the same help-page comparison rather than a Google statement.
Accounts with tracking marked Inactive in the past should recheck those conversion actions now that the label has split. A flag that reads Misconfigured after the change is worth an immediate tag audit; one that reads Awaiting conversions is not a tracking bug and does not need one.
Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz) reported the updated statuses on July 13, 2026.
