Conversion tracking is not optional

The policy asks for conversion tracking that is configured and recording — not just installed. An account with a conversion action set up that has never fired counts as an account without tracking.

Two checks, not one

There are two separate requirements and accounts fail the second one far more often:

• On the account. At least one conversion action, recording conversions.
• In every domain. If your campaigns send traffic to more than one website, each of those domains needs its own working tracking. An account advertising three domains with tags on one of them is only measuring a third of what it is paying for.

Why it matters beyond compliance

Conversion tracking is the gate to the single strongest change available on an Ad Grants account. The $2 cost-per-click cap does not apply to conversion-based bidding strategies — but those strategies need conversion data to run on. No tracking means no conversions, which means no conversion strategy, which means the account stays under the ceiling and 5.1% of its keywords enter the auction instead of 21.9%.

What to track

Pick something real and reachable. A donation completed is the obvious goal and often too rare to teach the bidding algorithm anything; a form submission, newsletter sign-up, started donation, phone click or volunteer application all fire often enough to be useful. We tested 113 real cases of organizations switching a campaign to a narrower, more meaningful conversion event: the effect on spend was zero in both directions. So set a real event for the sake of the report and the algorithm — not expecting the switch itself to lift results.

If you run a cookie banner

On average about a quarter of users decline cookies, and a consent banner blocks measurement tags until they accept. Consent Mode lets Google model those conversions instead of losing them, so the account reaches the threshold for a conversion strategy sooner. A banner without Consent Mode is, for measurement purposes, no different from having no banner at all. This applies where consent is required: the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland — and it depends on where your ads are shown, not where your organization is based.