A genuine convenience win
Visual Tagging, described in Google's Tag Manager announcement of 20 August 2026, lets somebody create a conversion by clicking the element on the page they want to track. No code, no developer ticket, no waiting for a release.
That is a real improvement and we should say so plainly. A marketer who needs to track a form submission this week has spent years being told to raise a ticket. Removing that friction is worth something.
It also lowers the cost of creating a conversion, and on an account nobody governs, that raises the odds of creating a duplicate one.
The sequence
- The account already fires a purchase conversion from the data layer on order completion. It is marked primary and it feeds Smart Bidding.
- Somebody wants visibility on checkout behaviour, opens Visual Tagging, and clicks the checkout button.
- A new conversion action is created. The default treatment puts it in the bidding set.
- Both are now primary. Both are now bidding.
Nobody did anything wrong at any step, and the tool did exactly what it advertised.
Why it does not surface
No error. No broken tag. No failed import. The dashboards populate, the conversion column has a number in it, and that number is higher than it was last month, which reads as good news.
The only symptom is a conversion count that is too high, measured against a true number nobody is holding. There is no second source to disagree with it.
The inflation is uneven, which is worse than large
A button click and a completed purchase fail in different ways and at different rates. Payment declines, abandoned forms, back-button traffic and slow confirmation pages all affect one and not the other.
So the ratio between the two counts is not stable. It moves with traffic mix, device mix, campaign mix and season.
A constant multiplier would at least be correctable. A drifting one is not, and Smart Bidding is optimising against it continuously.
The standard
One primary conversion fires per order. Exactly one.
Everything else is secondary: tracked, visible in reporting, available for analysis, and not in the bidding set.
That is the standard we hold accounts to. It is ours rather than an official Google recommendation, and it is deliberately boring, because a rule that can be checked in fifteen minutes survives staff turnover and a rule that requires judgement does not.
Two valid models, and why mixing them double counts
- Rollup primary. One conversion action represents any order. Order types (delivery, pickup, subscription) exist underneath it as secondary actions.
- Per-type primaries. Each order type has its own primary action, and the types are mutually exclusive, with no rollup action sitting above them.
Both are correct. Mixing them double counts, because the rollup counts the types underneath it a second time, and the account looks like it is growing.
The test for any proposed second primary
Name the order it represents.
If the answer is the same one, the conversation is over.
The wider problem, which is ownership
Tools keep getting better at letting non-technical people change measurement configuration. Ownership of that configuration has not kept pace anywhere we look.
Our Website Privacy Index scanned 47,505 public websites and scored 47,419, January to September 2026. 23,307 (49.2%) ran Google tags with no Consent Mode signal at all. That is what unowned tag configuration looks like at scale: not a mistake anybody made, a decision nobody made.
The related failures where the number looks fine and is not are in conversion tracking that broke without telling anyone and the GA4 and Google Ads mismatch. The consent side of the same announcement is in your Google tag is about to become a container.
Fifteen minutes, this week
List your conversion actions. Mark which are primary. Confirm that exactly one of them can fire per order. That is the whole audit and it needs nobody's help.
Two questions
Who approves a new primary conversion on this account? And would you find out if somebody added one last week?
If the answer to either is nobody, that is worth fixing before the next round of bidding changes. Our media tracking work starts with exactly this inventory, or book a data and tracking audit for the whole account.