The GA4 conversion in Google Ads fired on a page that returned 200 to curl

The GA4 conversion in Google Ads fired on a /thank-you/ page that returned 200 to curl

A simple test for your site.

curl -I https://yoursite.com/thank-you/If it comes back HTTP/1.1 200 OK (no redirect, no token in the URL, no session check), then anyone can load that page and ruin your Google ads campaign. The person who just submitted the form, hitting refresh. And whatever tag fires on that pageview fires for all of them.

If I was your competitor, that would be the easiest way to ruin your Google ads account especially if you use smart bidding or even performance max.

Everything below is what it looked like in one account for 7+ years, and what it did to the numbers for Google ads including how smart bidding kept overoptimising.

What we found

The site was WordPress on a LiteSpeed server. Forms were Contact Form 7. A redirect plugin sent every successful submission to /thank-you/. Google Tag Manager loaded on every page, including that one, and fired a GA4 event on the thank-you pageview.

That GA4 event was imported into Google Ads as a conversion action.

Each layer is a reasonable choice on its own. Stacked, they produce a conversion that fires whenever a URL loads, with no check on how the URL was reached. Ofcourse, a pageview as a conversion is the biggest mistake in this stack.

The query-string multiplier

One detail made it worse. The redirect plugin appended every submitted form field to the destination URL:

/thank-you/?your_name=Jane&your_email=jane%40example.com&your_phone=..That's a common plugin behaviour, usually so the thank-you page can personalise itself. But it means every submission produces a unique URL. To GA4, /thank-you/?your_name=Jane and /thank-you/?your_name=Jim are different pages. To a counting rule set to "every", they're different conversions even from the same click if the person goes back and resubmits.

How much it inflated

We compared the GA4 web-form action against a second action on the same form, a Google Ads tag configured to count once per click. Same page, same submissions, different counting rules.

The Ads-tag action under-fires for its own reasons (enhanced conversions matching), so the ratio isn't a clean inflation factor. But the drop from 6.25× to 2.24× after the counting rule changed is the size of the effect. The GA4 action had been reporting something like three to six times the unique submissions for as long as it had existed.

Smart bidding was optimising to that number.

The page that had six forms on it

While inspecting the site we pulled the main panel landing page and counted the forms.

Six separate form IDs on one page. Nobody designed that; it accrued over rebuilds/redesigns. Beyond the speed cost, it raised many questions: did all six redirect to /thank-you/? Did all six fire the event?

If two of the six didn't, part of the measured conversion rate was a measurement gap, not a page problem. Consolidating to one form removed the question.

The fix

- Layer 1 is a dropdown in GA4 and was applied in this account within a day.

- Layer 2 is a GTM trigger condition

- Layer 3 is the right long-term design and is what the rebuilt page should use.

- Layer 4 is belt-and-braces for high-value forms.

The problem after you fix it

Having changed the GA4 counting method to once-per-session, we checked the Google Ads side to confirm. It still read:

Days later, unchanged.

The natural conclusion is that the fix hadn't propagated. It had. For GA4-imported conversion actions, the Ads-side counting field does not reflect the GA4 setting. GA4 does the counting and exports the result; the Ads label stays at whatever it was. Do not use that field to verify a GA4 counting change. Use volume, compare the action against a one-per-click control over a week and watch the ratio.

The archaeology in the conversion list

Inspecting the account's conversion actions turned up the previous attempts to solve this:

Someone had built the correct solution, cf7_form_submission, and then it was archived in favour of the pageview version.

Which is the pattern: the pageview event is easier to verify in the interface because you can load the page and watch it fire. That is exactly the problem.

We see this often in many inherited agencies account. The other part of the problem is that organic data also inflates because all channels use the same thank you page. SEO, Socials, PPC and so on...

How to check your own site

- curl -Ithe thank-you URL. If 200, keep going.

- Open it in a private window.

- Open GTM, find the trigger on your conversion tag. If it's "Page View: Page Path contains /thank-you", you have this.

- Check the counting type on the conversion action in Google Ads. If it's "Every" on a lead form, it's inflated.

- Segment conversions by action over the last 30 days. If two actions are within a factor of two of each other and both fire on the form, they're probably the same event.

Which event to fix, when five look the same

Once the counting problem was identified, the fix was a dropdown in GA4: change the key event's counting method from "Once per event" to "Once per session." The hard part turned out to be knowing which event.

The GA4 property carried five events with nearly identical names, four of which had at one point been imported into Google Ads and later archived:

Change the counting method on Thank_You_GA4 and nothing happens to the live conversion. The name that matters is the one the live Ads conversion action points to: visible on the conversion action's detail page in Ads, or via conversion_action.google_analytics_4_settings.event_name in the API. Check that before you change anything in GA4.

Everything went through GTM, which is the control point

One structural detail from the server inspection. The site's source contained no hardcoded tag IDs at all: no gtag() calls, no AW- conversion IDs, no G- measurement IDs. Everything fired through a single GTM container.

If you're auditing a site and find the same thing, get GTM access before anything else. Without it you can diagnose the problem but not fix it, and every recommendation stays hypothetical.

The principle

A conversion should fire on the thing you're paying for (a submission, a call, a purchase), not on a page that usually follows it. The moment the trigger is a URL, you're counting visits to a URL, and a URL is something people can visit for any reason at all.

Some calls via curl tells you whether that's your problem too. If it is, every downstream number in the account will inflate and every ads campaign will optimise based on inflated data. You have been warned !