· Business
Why does Google Ads show more sales than your shop?
The report looked great: 660 conversions.
The shop had 26 orders in the same months.
This was a small wine shop in Austria, with €5,519 spent on ads since December.
- ad spend since December
- €5,519
- “conversions” in Google Ads
- 660
- real orders
- 26
- Google Ads conversions660
- Shop orders26
What happened
Google Ads was counting page views and add-to-cart as conversions. As if everyone who looked had bought.
Nobody did anything strange. The Shopify app adds these actions on its own. One setting decides which ones count.
The part nobody sees
Google Ads learns from what you call a win.
Tell it a win is "someone looked at a page", and it finds more people who look. Looking is cheap. Buying is not.
A wrong number doesn't just look nice. It teaches the ads to find the wrong people.
Where to look
In Google Ads: Goals → Conversions → Summary. One column shows which actions count.
For a shop, purchase should be the main one. The others can stay as secondary. You still see them, but Google doesn't chase them.
The two numbers never match exactly. Ad blockers, a click today and an order next week. But 660 vs. 26 is not a small gap.
It's one of the first things worth checking before spending more on ads. More on websites and ad pages.