<b>The conversions that outnumbered the leads</b>

<b>The conversions that outnumbered the leads</b>

A lead-gen agency proudly reported 420 conversions one month. The client's inbox held 280 leads. Everyone assumed a sync delay and shrugged.

The clue was in the thank-you page report: the /thank-you URL was firing the conversion event on every visit, including back-button returns and bookmarked reloads, inflating the count by 50%.

They moved the conversion trigger to a one-time form-submit event with a deduplication parameter instead of a raw pageview.

Reported conversions dropped to a truthful 281, matching the inbox within one, and cost-per-lead corrected from a flattering $34 to the real $51.

The lesson: a thank-you pageview is not a conversion. Fire on the submit, dedupe the reload, or you'll optimize toward a number nobody can cash.