Disabled Conversions with Active Volume
A conversion action in your Google Ads account is set to Disabled in Tools and Settings, but the Performance report still shows it accumulating conversions. Disabled actions should not be receiving hits. The fact that they are means either the tag is still firing in GTM, the report covers a window from before the action was disabled, or the action was disabled in Google Ads without anyone telling whoever owns the website.
Why It Matters
When a Google Ads conversion action is disabled, Google stops counting incoming hits toward bidding and Primary reports, but the underlying conversion ID and label still receive traffic if any tag still points at them. The hits land in a holding state that the Performance report exposes, and they accumulate over the report window even though they no longer influence Smart Bidding. The failure mode is a desync between two teams. Someone on the media side disables an action because it became obsolete or duplicative. Nobody removes the matching tag from GTM. The site keeps firing, the report keeps tallying, and nobody notices for months. Two specific risks follow. First, when the action is later re-enabled (often because the team forgot it was disabled), the count and value reset to whatever was accumulated under the dead label, which can flood Smart Bidding with stale signal. Second, if the same business event also has a live action, you cannot tell from the report alone whether the disabled action represents a leak or a stale clone.
How To Fix It
- Open the AdLint details and list each disabled action with non-zero volume.
- For each, check the conversion ID and label in Google Ads. Open the matching GTM conversion tag and confirm where it fires.
- If the action is genuinely obsolete, remove the GTM tag. Do not just pause it. A paused tag can be republished by mistake.
- If the action was disabled prematurely and should still be tracking, re-enable it in Google Ads and document the recovery decision.
- Re-run the audit. Disabled actions should report zero volume in the next reporting cycle.
Example
Action: "Newsletter Signup (old)"
Status: Disabled
Report volume (last 30 days): 412 conversions
Likely cause: GTM tag for the old label still firing on the live signup form.This Google Ads account has conversion actions marked Disabled in settings that are still receiving volume in the Performance report. Per Google Ads conversion-tracking documentation, disabled actions stop influencing Smart Bidding and Primary reporting but still accept incoming hits if any tag points at the original conversion ID and label. The result is a silent measurement leak: the website is sending conversions to a label nobody is monitoring, and re-enabling the action later flushes the accumulated stale signal back into bidding. Fix: identify each disabled action with volume, remove or rewire the originating GTM tag, and confirm zero volume on the action in the next reporting cycle. Source: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722022.
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References
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