How to Remove Conversions From Google Ads for Refunded Orders

The short answer

A customer buys, your Google tag records a $240 conversion, and a week later the customer returns everything. Your store shows $0. Google Ads still shows $240.

To remove conversions from Google Ads for refunded or canceled orders, you upload a conversion adjustments file. Each row names one order by its Order ID and says what to do with it: RETRACT to remove the conversion, or RESTATE to change its value. Google calls this “adjusting” conversions, and its How to adjust your conversions page is the official guide.

Three conditions decide whether it works. For website conversions, the original conversion must have been recorded with your own order ID (imported offline conversions can also be matched by click ID and conversion time). You must upload within the time limit, which is 54 days to be safe. And you should upload within 7 days if you want Smart Bidding to learn from the change.

Why refunds distort your Google Ads numbers

Google Ads records a purchase when the thank-you page loads. It knows nothing about what happens later: the refund, the chargeback, the canceled booking, the order your warehouse couldn’t ship.

For a store with few returns, that gap is small. For fashion, furniture, travel or any business with frequent cancellations, it adds up. Your reported conversion value is higher than the money you kept, so your return on ad spend (ROAS, revenue divided by ad cost) looks better than it is.

The bigger problem is bidding. Smart Bidding is Google’s automated bidding, which sets your bids from conversion data. Its strategies, such as Target ROAS (a target return on ad spend) and Target CPA (a target cost per conversion), learn from the conversions you report. If a campaign brings in a lot of orders that are later refunded, bidding still sees them as wins and keeps paying for that traffic. Google’s About conversion adjustments page says a retraction updates the Conversions, Conv. value and All conv. value columns and affects CPA and ROAS bid strategies. A restatement changes the value columns and affects ROAS strategies.

So removing refunded conversions isn’t about tidy reports. It is about teaching bidding which sales were real.

Retract or restate?

The choice depends on whether any value is left after the refund.

The most common mistake is putting the refund amount in Adjusted Value. Google wants the new value of the conversion, not the difference. A $500 order with a $100 refund is restated to 400. If a second $50 refund follows, it is restated to 350.

Google also lets you raise values. Its About conversion adjustments page lists customer lifetime value as a use case: when a customer becomes more valuable over time, you can restate upward. For refunds, though, you will mostly be retracting and restating down.

Restating to 0 is the same as retracting. Google treats a conversion restated to 0 as withdrawn (How to adjust your conversions).

What you need first

An order ID on every conversion. Google says you should already be tracking conversions with an order ID before you adjust them, because the order ID is what identifies each conversion. On your website, that means the Google tag sends a transaction_id with every purchase, usually your order or confirmation number. Google’s transaction ID page adds an important catch: adjustments need a persistent ID that you provide. The temporary IDs Google generates on its own, which start with GG_, can’t be used.

If your purchase tag never sent a transaction ID, you can’t adjust those past website conversions. Fix the tag now so future refunds can be handled.

For offline imports, a fallback. Conversions you uploaded from a CRM with a Google Click ID (GCLID) can be adjusted with the GCLID plus the exact conversion time you uploaded, if they have no Order ID. Google still recommends the Order ID. Two exceptions: a conversion that came with a GBRAID can only be adjusted by Order ID, and Google’s API guide says adjustments don’t work with WBRAIDs at all. Our guide to gbraid and wbraid explains what those two IDs are.

The right account. Some businesses track conversions in a manager account that covers several ad accounts, which Google calls cross-account conversion tracking. If yours does, Google says the adjustments must be uploaded from the manager account.

The exact conversion name. The file names the conversion action, and the spelling and capitals must match what is in your account.

The time limits

Timing matters more than anything else here, and Google’s pages give four numbers.

Wait 24 hours. Google recommends uploading adjustments at least 24 hours after the original conversion. A conversion from the last day may not be recorded yet, and then nothing is adjusted. Google suggests including an extra day’s data in each upload to catch those.

Upload within 7 days for bidding. Google says you have up to 7 days after a conversion is first recorded for automated bidding to read an adjustment. Later adjustments still fix your reports, but bidding has already learned from the original value.

The overall limit: 54 or 55 days. Here Google’s own pages disagree. The How to adjust your conversions guide says adjustments can be made within 54 days. The Offline conversion imports FAQ says up to 55 days from when the conversion was first recorded. Treat 54 days as your limit. If you plan around the shorter number, you are safe under both pages.

What this means for a business with a 30-day return policy: most refunds will land inside 54 days, but many will miss the 7-day bidding window. If returns are a large share of your sales, weekly uploads are the minimum. Some businesses also report a purchase value that already allows for typical returns, but that is a strategy choice, not something Google’s adjustment pages cover.

How to upload the adjustments step by step

1. Export your refunds. From your store, booking system, CRM or payment platform, export the refunded and canceled orders for the period. You need the order ID, the refund date and, for partial refunds, the order total and amounts refunded.

2. Get Google’s template. In Google Ads, go to Goals › Conversions › Uploads, click the plus button, click View templates and choose Conversions adjustments. Google says you can also get it through Data Manager. Keep every column in the template. Don’t add columns, and don’t add personal details such as emails or phone numbers.

3. Fill in one row per adjustment. The columns are:

• Order ID: the same ID the original conversion was recorded with.
• Conversion Name: the conversion action, spelled exactly as in your account.
• Adjustment Time: when the refund happened or when you learned of it. It must be after the conversion and before the upload.
• Adjustment Type: RETRACT or RESTATE.
• Adjusted Value: the new value for restatements; leave it empty for retractions.
• Adjusted Value Currency: a three-letter code such as USD. If you leave it empty, Google uses the conversion action’s currency.

Set the time zone too. Google accepts a time zone ID such as America/Chicago or a GMT offset like -0500, and its adjustment guide recommends the ID, to avoid errors when clocks change for daylight saving time. If your refund times are in one zone and Google reads them in another, a refund made soon after an order can look as if it came before the order, and that row fails.

4. Keep it separate. New conversions and adjustments can’t go in the same file. If you also upload offline sales, use two files.

5. Upload and apply. Upload it like an offline conversion file (import steps): on the Uploads page, click the plus button, choose your file, preview the results, and apply it. If you want this to run on its own, Google points advertisers who update conversions programmatically to scheduled uploads. Note that Google now calls this file import a legacy feature and recommends Google Ads Data Manager for importing conversions; its adjustment guide says you can get the adjustments template through Data Manager too.

6. Read the errors. Some rows will fail, and that is often fine. A refund for an order that never came from a Google Ads click has no conversion to adjust, so Google returns an error for that row. Google’s About conversion adjustments page recommends uploading all your refunds anyway rather than guessing which ones came from ads.

Building this file by hand from a store export means a lot of copying, date reformatting and arithmetic for partial refunds. The conversion adjustments builder for Google Ads does it in your browser: it decides RETRACT or RESTATE per order, works out running totals for repeat partial refunds, writes the times with an offset, and flags rows older than 54 days before you upload.

Mistakes you can't undo

Adjustments are one-way in a few important places, so check the file before you apply it. Google says incorrect adjustments can’t be edited after the import; you correct the value and import again.

A retraction is final. Google says there is no way to undo a retraction or a restatement to 0. Any later adjustment to that conversion is ignored, and Google shows no error, so it simply looks as if nothing happened.

The workaround only covers some conversions. For imported conversions counted as “every conversion,” Google’s workaround is to upload the same conversion again with a slightly different timestamp, so it counts as new. The About conversion adjustments page adds that re-uploading with the same Order ID is rejected as a duplicate, so you would use a new one, such as the old ID with “-1” added. Website conversions are different: Google says they can’t be added back to reports once removed.

Duplicates are ignored. Google identifies an adjustment by its Order ID, conversion name and adjustment time. Two rows with the same three values count once. If an order had two partial refunds at the same moment, combine them into one restatement.

Order matters. When one order has several adjustments, Google processes them by adjustment time, earliest first. A late restatement after an early retraction does nothing.

The safest habit: test with a handful of rows the first time, check the result in your conversion columns, then upload the rest.

Make it a weekly routine

Refunds don’t stop, so this works best as a fixed habit rather than a one-time cleanup:

1. Pick a day. Every Monday, export refunds and cancellations from the past 8 days. The extra day catches anything that was too fresh last time.
2. Build and check the file. Remove orders older than 54 days, and make sure every partial refund is restated to the order’s new total.
3. Upload from the right account. Use the manager account if it owns the conversion tracking.
4. Keep a log. Save each file with its date. Because retractions are final, a record of what you sent is the only way to answer “why did last month’s revenue drop?”
5. Watch the trend, not one day. Adjustments show up in reports in roughly the same time as regular conversion data, according to Google. Compare a full week before and after.

If your refunds come from offline sales you already import, our guide to uploading offline conversions to Google Ads covers the matching upload for new sales. Keep the two files apart, and Google Ads will finally show what you actually earned.