Report Metrics Without Settings Configuration
Your Google Ads Performance report shows volume for one or more conversion actions whose names do not appear in your conversion settings export. Either the action was deleted from settings without removing the underlying tags, the report was pulled from a different account than the settings, or the action was renamed and the report kept the old name on historical volume.
Why It Matters
Conversion settings is the live config. The Performance report is the historical record of what actually fired. The two should overlap. Names in the report should map cleanly to actions in settings. When they do not, three causes are typical. The first is deletion. Someone removed an action from settings while the GTM tag or imported feed kept firing. The report keeps recording until the upstream source is taken down. The second is renaming. Settings shows the new name, the report still carries pre-rename volume under the old name, and the two diverge until the historical window rolls past the rename date. The third is account confusion. The settings export and the report were pulled from different accounts or different manager-account views, and the comparison is invalid from the start. AdLint tries a fuzzy match to spot the rename case automatically. If a report name is similar to a settings name, the finding flags it as a "possible match" rather than an orphan. True orphans usually mean a deletion that was not followed through on the tagging side.
How To Fix It
- Open the AdLint details. The check separates truly-orphaned report names from fuzzy-matched possible renames.
- For truly-orphaned names, find the upstream source. If it is a GTM tag, locate the tag by Conversion ID and either delete it or repoint it at a current action. If it is an offline conversion import or a Google Analytics import, disable the import.
- For fuzzy-matched renames, confirm the rename was intentional and annotate the change date. The report will reconcile as new volume replaces historical volume.
- If neither applies, verify the settings export and the report came from the same Google Ads account, the same time window, and the same view.
- Re-run AdLint after the next reporting cycle.
Example
Report row: "Lead - Demo Request (legacy)"
Settings: no matching action.
Likely cause: action deleted in Q1, but the form still fires the old AW-XXXXXX/legacyLabel tag.This Google Ads account has conversion names in the Performance report that have no corresponding entry in conversion settings. Per Google Ads conversion-tracking documentation, settings is the current configuration surface while the Performance report is the historical record; orphaned report rows typically mean the action was deleted from settings without removing the GTM tag, offline import, or analytics import that feeds it, or the action was renamed and historical volume still carries the old name. Fix: separate truly-orphaned rows from fuzzy-matched possible renames, take down the upstream tag or import for genuine orphans, and annotate any intentional renames so historical reporting can be reconciled. Source: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722022.
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References
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