Google Ads can credit an offline conversion to an account that never generated the click or call behind it, according to a contributor article by John Horn, CEO of StubGroup, published in Search Engine Land on November 5. Horn also reports that the “Successful” status shown after an upload does not mean the conversion will reach reporting. Both findings affect agencies that send sales data back to Google by batch.
The first issue involves multi-account uploads. Some agencies and multi-brand advertisers push one file to several ad accounts to save time. Horn says Google used to accept a GCLID or phone number only in the account that produced the click, and reject it elsewhere. If the accounts share a conversion name, such as Purchase, Google can now accept the conversion in an account that had nothing to do with the click.
Horn saw this with a multi-brand client running one standalone account per brand under a single manager account. The accounts all used an identically named conversion action, and specific GCLIDs were accepted by more than one account. After extended back-and-forth, Google Support told him the behavior was expected.
The bidding question remains open. Support said those stray conversions are excluded from Smart Bidding, and that only the campaign behind the click gets bidding credit. Horn, however, saw the conversions appear in the Conversions column, tied to campaigns that did not generate them, and included in cost per conversion. He had no independent way to verify any Smart Bidding effect. Google also still returns errors saying the click is not associated with the account, and Horn found no clear reason why it accepts some rows and rejects others.
His suggested fixes are straightforward. Upload each conversion only to the account that generated it. Rename each account’s conversion action so it is unique, and use that name in the file. Or track cross-account conversions at the manager level rather than through a conversion action in every child account.
The second issue is the upload status. The interface says “Successful,” and the downloaded report says “#OK.” Google Support told Horn that validation confirms only a well-formed file, an existing conversion action, and a GCLID that Google recognizes. Attribution checks come later. He noticed the gap when far fewer conversions showed up than had been marked #OK. Google’s usual explanations for such gaps are duplicate GCLIDs and clicks it judged invalid.
Horn gives an example of the arithmetic. Upload 100 conversions, see 90 reported as successful, and find 60 in the account, and the real acceptance rate is 60 percent. He notes that standard Conversions columns date each conversion by when the click happened, so lag will keep the counts from matching exactly.
Horn places the findings against a Google Ads Developer Blog post from March 26, “Upcoming Improvements to Offline Conversion Imports.” It described better attribution and fallback recovery from April, plus flexible import requests from April to May that would let a manager or client account import for a different account. Whether those changes relate to the behavior he found is not stated in the article.
For a search team, the stakes are plain. Offline conversion data feeds the reports clients use to judge spend, and possibly the signals that steer automated bidding. Inflated counts in one account can sit beside missing counts in another, and neither shows up as an error.
Anyone running batch imports should reconcile uploads against reported conversions by conversion time this week, record every distinct GCLID they send, and rename shared conversion actions before trusting cost-per-conversion trends built on them.
Search Engine Land, contributor article by John Horn of StubGroup, published November 5, 2026.
