About conversion goals

Conversion goals help you organize your conversion actions so that you can more easily optimize toward your advertising objectives.

Conversion actions are actions that you want your customers to take. They are grouped together based on related categories to form these conversion goals. For example, the “Purchase” conversion goal automatically includes all conversion actions, such as purchasing online on select websites or purchasing through select apps, that fall under the “Purchase” category type.

On this page

• Benefits
• Conversion goals overview
  • Conversion goal types
  • How conversion goals are used in bidding
• Conversion actions
  • How conversion actions are used in bidding
• How conversion actions and conversion goals work together to influence bidding
• How conversion goals and conversion actions impact campaign reporting

Benefits

• Semantically meaningful grouping that helps advance optimization: The conversion actions in your account are automatically grouped into relevant conversion goals to describe the actions that are the most meaningful for your business. This also helps unlock bidding improvements and optimization opportunities.
• Simplify conversion management: Select and edit conversion goals when you create new campaigns to make sure you’re fully optimizing for conversions that matter and getting the most from your campaigns. Capturing all relevant conversion actions is critical to helping you achieve your advertising objective. You can also set up account-default conversion goals that you can apply to various campaigns to save time on managing conversion goals for each campaign.
• Improve campaign performance: Using account-default goals makes sure that all your valuable conversions are considered across all your campaigns for your smart bidding strategies. This gives Google AI more data to learn from to power your bid strategies and deliver better performance. Learn how Smart Bidding uses advanced machine learning to save time and boost performance.

Conversion goals overview

Conversion goals are used to group conversion actions into semantically meaningful categories that represent the type of transaction, for example, “Purchases”, “Contacts”, or “Submit lead forms”. These goals are used to drive bidding optimization for your campaigns.

Conversion goal types

Standard goals

Conversion actions that you add are automatically grouped into conversion goals based on their conversion category type, for example, “Purchases”, “Contacts”, or “Submit lead forms”. These goals are called standard conversion goals.

You can select standard goals as goals for default bidding optimization across all campaigns in your account by making them “account-default conversion goals”. Those you haven’t chosen as account-default goals can still be used for bidding optimization in specific campaigns.

Account-default goals

The standard conversion goals you set up as account-default goals should be the conversion goals you’d like all campaigns in your account to bid and optimize toward automatically. These are typically the most meaningful goals for your business. When you create a new campaign, all account-default goals in your account are selected for optimization by default.

To get the most out of Google AI and cross-campaign learning within the account, it's recommended that you optimize all your campaigns to meet the same set of goals. You can do this by aligning all your campaigns to the same account-default goals. When you create a new campaign, you’ll be shown your existing account-default goals to add to your campaign.

Custom goals (for advanced users)

Custom goals are goals that you can create and add any combination of primary and secondary conversion actions. For example, you can create a custom goal with a primary conversion action from the “Purchase” conversion goal and a secondary conversion action from the “Submit Lead Form” conversion goal. You can create custom goals in your “Conversions Summary” (to view the summary in Google Ads, click "Tools" and then under “Measurement”, click "Conversions").

Note that generally, these goals are for advanced use and aren't recommended in most cases.

View your conversion goals

1. Go to Summary in Conversions drop-down within the Goals menu.

In addition to the predefined goal categories Google Ads provides, you can define your own custom goals. Custom goals are goals you create when you add any combination of conversion actions. If you create a custom goal, you’ll find it at the bottom of your goals page.

How conversion goals are used in bidding

When you set up a campaign, you select which goals it bids toward. Your campaign’s conversion report, specifically the “Conversions” and “Conversion value” columns will reflect these goals.

View and edit your campaign’s conversion goal settings

1. Go to Campaigns within the “Campaigns” menu.
2. Select the Settings tab, then select the campaign you want to edit the settings.
3. Expand Conversion goals to show the goals your campaign is optimizing toward.
4. You have the option to optimize toward account-default conversion goals or campaign-specific goals.
   1. Account-default: The campaign uses all conversion goals marked as “account-default” on the conversions summary page.
   2. Campaign-specific: The campaign uses conversion goals you explicitly select, which can include any custom goals.
5. Hover over each goal to view which conversion actions you set as Primary (eligible for bidding) within that goal.

Conversion actions

Conversion actions are meaningful and concrete steps your customer and potential customers take, such as an online purchase or a phone call. Measured with conversion tracking, these actions represent valuable milestones for your business.

Conversion goals help group these related conversion actions and are categorized based on the category type you select.

Learn how to set up a conversion action.

How conversion actions are used in bidding

You can set conversion actions within each of your goals as either primary and secondary settings.

• Primary action: The action can be used for bidding and reporting, provided the campaign optimizes toward the associated conversion goal.
• Secondary action: The action isn’t used for bidding or reporting, even if the goal it’s a part of is used in a campaign. Report data for these actions are found in the “All conv.” column.

How conversion actions and conversion goals work together to influence bidding

For a campaign to use a conversion action for bidding, you must meet 2 conditions:

• The conversion action must be set as Primary.
• The campaign must use the goal that contains the conversion action for bidding.

How conversion goals and conversion actions impact campaign reporting

Only the primary conversion actions your campaign optimizes toward will appear in the “Conversions” and “Conversion value” columns in your campaign report. You can still view reports for secondary conversion actions in the “All conv.” and “All conv. Value” columns. Sample below:

Related links

• Using conversion goals to guide new campaigns
• Manage conversion goals from the conversions summary