Google Ads lead form conversions are attributed to click date, not submission date

The account had five lead form assets. Two were old promotional forms attached only to removed video campaigns. One was a generic "Request a free quote" form that had been detached from everything. And two (the two that mattered), had exactly the same name.

Same headline, same call to action, same field set. In the interface they are indistinguishable without opening each one. One pushed every submission to the CRM through a webhook. The other had a blank webhook field and had been quietly collecting leads that nobody was automatically told about.

What we found on arrival

Every lead form link on every enabled campaign, 24 of them, had been paused during an account restructure on 24–25 August. The forms existed; nothing was serving them. Lead form submissions, which had been 8–10% of the account's conversions, went to zero.

On inspection, the links split between the two same-named assets:

Fourteen campaigns, including both Performance Max campaigns, had been pointed at the form with no webhook. Their leads were landing in Google Ads and nowhere else.

What we did

Two operations, in order, on 3 September.

Verification afterwards, via the API rather than the confirmation screen:

One form serving the whole account. No leakage at the account level or through asset groups. Done.

Then the removed form kept converting

Three days later the client asked why the form they'd removed was still showing leads.

The API said it wasn't serving:

Clean handover mid-afternoon on the 3rd. Zero impressions on the old asset from the 4th onward. A removed asset cannot serve an impression.

But the lead-form conversion report showed the old form's totals still growing.

Because conversion date is click date

Google Ads attributes a lead-form submission to the date of the click that led to it, not the date the form was submitted. And it attributes it to the asset that served on that click.

A person who clicked an ad on 29 August, saw the old form, and then came back on 5 September to submit the form on the ad they'd bookmarked (or simply had the tab open), produces a conversion dated 29 August, on the old form. For as long as the click-through lookback window runs, conversions keep arriving on days before the changeover, against the asset that was live then.

The removed form wasn't receiving leads. The report was answering a different question from the one being asked.

What the day-by-day actually showed

Lead-form submissions by asset, by click date:

Every one of the 27.7 old-form submissions was on a click date before the changeover. Every one of the new-form submissions was after it. Exactly what you'd expect if the switch was clean, which it was.

What the old form had been catching

Of those 27.7 submissions on the no-webhook form, by campaign:

Nearly half came from a single Performance Max campaign. None of them reached the CRM through the webhook, because there was no webhook. The business had been downloading that form's leads manually from the Google Ads interface every day, which worked, as long as somebody remembered to do it, and as long as nobody assumed the automation was handling it.

That's not a lost-leads story. It's a single-point-of-failure story, and it was one holiday away from becoming a lost-leads story.

The policy flag that made the good form look worse

One more wrinkle. The working form carried a policy status of Approved (limited), with a financial-services verification flag. The no-webhook form was plain Approved.

The account advertises exclusively in Australia. The restriction had no effect: confirmed by the 5,813 impressions the form served the day after the switch. But side by side in the interface, the broken form had a clean green marker and the working form had a yellow one. Anyone tidying up by policy status would have picked the wrong one.

How to read the report correctly

If the old form shows anything in a window that starts after the changeover, something is actually still serving it, check customer_asset and asset_group_asset, the two places a form can be attached that don't show up in campaign settings.

What to do about same-named assets

The principle

Google Ads reports are answers to specific questions, and the question is not always the one on the column header. "Conversions by lead form" is really "conversions by the lead form that served the click, by click date." Once you know that, the report is fine. Until you know it, it will tell you a removed asset is alive.