Why Am I Getting EVENT_NOT_FOUND and CLICK_CONVERSION_ALREADY_EXISTS?

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Mike M

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Jul 10, 2022, 10:55:43 PM7/10/22

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I've been storing gclids for legitimate traffic in my database when customers come to my website. Then, I use the v11 REST API for Google Offline Conversions to post the whole sales cycle from download of our product, purchase, and upsell.

Occasionally when sending traffic, I keep getting EVENT_NOT_FOUND and sometimes CLICK_CONVERSION_ALREADY_EXISTS. However, these do not make sense to me because when I search my table for these entries, I only see one instance by event date, conversionAction (like download, purchase, and upsell), and gclid. These seem to occur around 30% of the time. Now, granted, I remove data out of my database tables that are older than 90 days. However, I wouldn't think Google would track a gclid longer than 90 days, anyway.

Really, the only events I should be getting back from this API should be:

SUCCESS - the conversion was posted and no retries should be done

EXPIRED_EVENT - the data may be older than 90 days and so this event is effectively dead and no retries should be done

TOO_RECENT_EVENT - schedule it for retry in the next 30 minutes

LATER_THAN_MAXIMUM_DATE - schedule it for retry in the next 30 minutes because 6 hours haven't passed yet on it

Indeed, the bulk of my responses have been the above events and my code is handling these properly. It's just that the EVENT_NOT_FOUND and CLICK_CONVERSION_ALREADY_EXISTS are baffling and I cannot determine why they are occurring. And in some cases (but not all) where CLICK_CONVERSION_ALREADY_EXISTS has been filed, I look in my last_status column in my database and don't appear to have a value there (NULL) because this was the first time my code posted this.

Is this a bug with Google Ads?

Google Ads API Forum Advisor

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Jul 11, 2022, 2:25:19 AM7/11/22

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Hi Mike,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

Moving forward, you may note that the EVENT_NOT_FOUND is when the click associated with the given identifier or iOS URL parameter could not be found in the system. This can happen if the identifier or iOS URL parameter are collected for non Google Ads clicks.

And for the CLICK_CONVERSION_ALREADY_EXISTS, this means that the conversion with this timestamp already exists for this click. To upload another conversion, please use a different timestamp.

You can check these errors in this ConversionUploadError documentation .

Since you said that you are having this occasionally, You may note that if you encounter this issue again and there’s something that blocking you in these errors, then you may provide to us the complete API logs (request and response logs with request ID ) generated on your end having these errors so our team can further investigate it on our end.

For you to have these logs, note that this can be requested or provided to the developer handling the Google Ads API transactions when logging of the API requests has been enabled.

These are the specific guidelines to enable it.

You may then send those logs via the Reply privately to author option. If this option is not available, you may send the details directly to our googleadsa...@google.com alias instead.

Best regards,

Heidi
Google Ads API Team