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21 October 2026

Google Ads conversion tracking and consent mode in the UK

“We’re getting clicks, but are we getting customers?” It’s the question behind a lot of Google Ads accounts that feel like a money pit. Clicks are easy. Google shows you those whether you ask or not. Enquiries, booked jobs and sales only appear once you’ve told Google what they look like, and in the UK the cookie rules decide how much of that it’s allowed to see.

In brief

Only let the actions that mean money steer your bids. Watch the rest without letting them drive anything.
Count one conversion per click for enquiries, every one for sales.
Phone calls are easy to miss.
Advertising cookies still need consent in the UK, and consent mode decides what Google gets when people say no.

Why the setup matters more than the dashboard

Automated bidding does exactly what it’s told. Tell it a conversion is a visit to the contact page and it’ll go and find you lots of people who visit the contact page. Some of them will get in touch. Plenty won’t.

Picture a kitchen fitter whose account shows forty conversions last month. Thirty-one were brochure downloads. The phone rang four times. On paper the campaign’s flying, and the diary’s half empty. Our guide to how Google Ads works for a business covers the auction and bidding. This one’s about the settings nobody explains when you first click ‘new conversion action’.

Primary and secondary conversion actions

Google splits conversion actions into two kinds. Primary actions show in the Conversions column and get used for bidding when their goal is set to bid. Secondary ones are “for observation only”. You’ll find them in the All conversions column, where you can keep an eye on them without them steering the bids. The one exception is a secondary action added to a custom goal, which does get used for bidding.

It’s probably the most useful setting in the account. Make the real outcomes primary. For an accountant that’s likely a consultation request and a phone call. A wedding venue might care about viewing bookings and nothing else. Brochure downloads, newsletter sign-ups and price list views can all sit in secondary. You still see them. They just stop pulling the budget towards people who were only having a look.

Google calls getting this right “critical”. It also warns against frequent changes to goals, budgets or targets while Smart Bidding is learning, because that resets the learning period. So decide, set it, then leave it alone for a while.

Already tracking enquiries in Analytics? Our post on tracking website enquiries with GA4 key events explains how to set those up so Ads has something sound to import.

Counting, windows and the small print

Two quieter settings change the numbers more than you’d expect.

Counting

‘Every’ counts each conversion after an ad click. ‘One’ counts a single conversion per click for that action. Google recommends ‘One’ for leads and ‘Every’ for purchases. Someone who sends a solicitors’ firm three contact forms in a panic is still one new enquiry. Someone who buys three things from an online shop is three sales.

Conversion windows

The conversion window is how long after a click a conversion still gets credited to the ad. For click-through conversions it’s 30 days unless you change it, and depending on the conversion source you can set anything from a day up to 90. Long decisions need long windows. A manufacturer selling machine parts to other businesses might wait weeks for a purchase order. A takeaway won’t.

Don’t forget the phone

Think about how a roofer or an electrician actually gets work. Someone rings. Yet it’s easy to end up with an account where calls are missing altogether, or only counted as a tap on a number.

Google can track calls from ads, calls to a number on your website, taps on a number on your mobile site and calls you import yourself, among others. For calls from ads and calls to your website number you choose a minimum call length, and anything at least that long counts. That stops a ten-second wrong number looking like a booked job.

Website call tracking works by showing a Google forwarding number on your site in place of your own. The UK is on Google’s list of countries where these numbers are available. Tap tracking is still worth having. It’s just weaker. A tap tells you someone tried to ring. It can’t tell you anyone picked up.

When the sale happens offline

Plenty of businesses never take money on the website. A physiotherapy clinic gets a form, rings back and books an assessment. A builder quotes, waits a fortnight, then wins the job. Google only ever saw the form.

Enhanced conversions for leads closes some of that gap. Google describes it as an upgraded version of offline conversion import. When someone fills in your form, the Google tag sends a hashed version of details such as their email address. Later, when that lead turns into a customer, you import the same hashed details from your customer records and Google matches the sale back to the campaign that produced it. Google also suggests keeping click IDs, called GCLIDs, in the mix where you can.

Somebody has to mark leads as won, so it takes a bit of organisation. For a business with a long sales cycle, though, it’s the difference between bidding on forms and bidding on customers. It also relies on the form doing its job, so make sure your contact forms actually deliver every enquiry before you build anything on top.

Consent mode and the UK cookie rules

This is the part UK advertisers can’t skip. Google Ads tags use cookies and similar technology for advertising, and the ICO couldn’t be plainer about it. “If your service uses storage or access technologies for the purposes of online advertising, you must get consent.” None of the exceptions apply.

Didn’t the rules just change? They did. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 amended the cookie rules, and that part came into force on 5 February 2026. It added new exceptions, such as one for statistics used to improve your site, as long as people are told and can easily object. Advertising wasn’t among them. The government has been weighing up exceptions for some advertising uses, and the ICO sent it advice in May 2026, but at the time of writing the law hasn’t moved.

Consent mode is how your banner talks to Google’s tags. It doesn’t give you a banner. It passes on what the visitor chose, using four signals that cover advertising storage, sending user data to Google for ads, personalised ads and analytics storage. Then there are two ways to set it up.

Basic

Google’s tags wait until the visitor answers the banner. If they decline, nothing goes to Google at all, not even the fact that they said no. Google’s conversion modelling then works from a general model.

Advanced

The tags load as the page opens, with consent set to denied by default until the visitor chooses. If a visitor refuses, the tags send cookieless pings in place of full data, which feed a more detailed model built around your own account. Modelling only kicks in once your tags have collected enough data to meet Google’s threshold.

Which suits you is a call to make with whoever looks after your privacy compliance. Advanced gives Google more to model with. Basic sends nothing until someone agrees. Either way, expect your conversion figures to come in below your real enquiry count. Some visitors will say no, and modelling only fills part of that gap. All of this is general information. Take advice on your own setup.

Checking it actually works

Every conversion action carries a status. Green ‘Active’ is what you want. ‘Needs attention’ means something wants fixing, though recording hasn’t stopped entirely. ‘Misconfigured’ is the bad one. Recording has stopped, usually because a tag’s broken or something was set up wrong. ‘Awaiting conversions’ just means nothing in the last seven days, which is fine for a brand-new action and a worry on a busy account.

Glance at them monthly, then put the Conversions column next to your inbox, call log and diary. They’ll never match exactly. They should rise and fall together. If Google claims twenty enquiries in a month when your inbox saw two, something’s being counted that shouldn’t be. And check where the clicks land. Tracking can show you a page isn’t turning visitors into enquiries. It won’t fix it, which is where proper landing pages built for your ads earn their keep.

Sort the tracking before touching the budget, too. Our post on setting a Google Ads budget that makes sense works back from cost per lead, and that sum’s only as good as the lead count.

Getting tracking you can rely on

Most accounts don’t need anything clever. They need the right actions set as primary, calls tracked properly, sensible counting and consent mode wired into the banner. If you’d rather hand it over, setting it up and keeping an eye on it is a standard part of our Google Ads management service. Or get in touch and we’ll look at what your account’s counting right now.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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