Conversion Lift isn’t available for all Google Ads accounts. To use Conversion Lift, contact your Google account representative.
Conversion Lift measures the incremental number of conversions, site visits, and any other action directly driven by your ad. Conversion Lift data can help you adjust and improve your ads to generate more sales, leads, and app installs. Learn more About Conversion Lift.
On this page
- Before you begin
- Conversion Lift feasibility
- Supported conversion actions and reporting
- Best practices for measuring Conversion Lift
- Instructions
- Frequently asked questions
Before you begin
- Before you can set up Conversion Lift measurement, you need to create an eligible campaign.
- For new campaign types in alpha or beta phase, reach out to your Google account representative for eligibility.
Learn more About Conversion Lift.
Account threshold
- Observed conversions: You must have at least 1,000 observed conversions. Conversions with supplementary data don’t count towards the minimum required conversions.
- Budget: The study requires a minimum campaign budget of $5,000 USD.
- Conversion actions: Your account must track at least one conversion action compatible with Conversion Lift. Learn more about the Supported conversion actions.
Campaign eligibility
- Supported campaign types: Display, Search, Video, Demand Gen, App Campaigns and Performance Max campaigns.
- Note: App campaigns targeted iOS and Travel Ads aren’t supported.
- Study limits: Campaigns can be part of max one study at a time (whether Brand Lift, Search Lift, or Conversion Lift). Remove a campaign from an existing study before adding it to a new one.
Ensuring data strength
To run a reliable study and maximize data strength, implement the following features prior to launch:
- Enhanced conversions: Implement enhanced conversions for web and enhanced conversions for leads to pass securely hashed, first-party customer data, recover unobserved conversion, and improve result accuracy. Learn more about Supported conversion actions and reporting.
- Consent mode: Implement this feature to ensure your conversion tags adjust automatically based on user consent choices. This is critical to recover missing data through modeling, preserve measurement accuracy, and maintain legal compliance in privacy-sensitive regions like the European Economic Area. Learn how to Get started with consent mode.
- Advanced consent mode: Upgrade your consent mode implementation to allow Google tags to load and send cookieless pings before a user interacts with your consent banner. This allows you to recover a higher volume of data while still respecting user privacy choices. Learn how to Set up advanced consent mode.
- Google tag gateway: Set up this infrastructure feature to route your tracking scripts through your own first-party domain rather than third-party Google domains. This recovers missing signals otherwise blocked by browser restrictions or ad blockers. Learn how to Set up Google tag gateway for advertisers.
Note: Automated diagnostics run during study setup to verify your tracking readiness. You can create and save your study regardless of warning severity, but we highly recommend resolving these gaps before launch to optimize the accuracy and reliability of your incrementality data.
Conversion Lift feasibility
Conversion Lift feasibility, also called Study Power, is an essential tool that estimates the certainty of results from your lift study. It helps determine the likelihood of successfully measuring the true, causal impact of your campaigns.
Study power indicates your study's certainty of achieving conclusive results and is shaped by several factors:
- Your chosen study configuration, including:
- Selected conversion actions
- Daily campaign budget
- Study duration
- Traffic split (holdback percentage)
- Historical campaign data at the account level, excluding manager-level data
- Estimated lift
Understand certainty levels
The estimated certainty of lift is shown as a percentage range from 50% to 95%, in 5% increments. A higher percentage indicates a greater likelihood that your ads will generate lift. If your study power is below 90%, budget guidance will be provided to help you achieve 90% certainty of lift. Learn more About certainty levels.
Guidance:
- 90%+ certainty: Aim for 90% certainty for the most reliable results. If your setup is below 90%, the tool will provide budget guidance to help you reach this level.
- Directional results: Results between 50% and 90% can be used as directional results.
- Optimal level: You should determine the optimal certainty of lift based on your specific business needs and risk tolerance.
Supported conversion actions and reporting
Choosing conversions that happen more often increases certainty of lift results. While your study measures the specific conversion actions you select, final results are reported at the conversion goal level, and you can still filter for all conversions in the final report.
Tip: Conversion Lift studies that use Bayesian methodology support conversion type slicing by default. This feature lets you segment reporting in Google Ads for any biddable conversion in your account linked to at least one campaign in the study.
Directly measured conversions
- Enhanced conversions for web: Implement enhanced conversions for web to pass securely hashed, first-party customer data when a transaction occurs on your website. This captures conversions missed by traditional methods, matches web transactions to Google ads interactions in a privacy-safe way, and may improve the accuracy of your lift results. Learn more About enhanced conversions for web.
- Enhanced conversions for leads: Implement this feature and ensure you have sufficient hashed PII to upload offline customer data securely from your CRM or lead management platform. This links your offline lead-generation events back to your campaigns to Google ads interactions in a privacy-safe way, recovers unobserved conversions through modeling, and may improve the accuracy of your lift results. Learn more About enhanced conversions for leads.
Supplementary Conversion Reporting
Conversion Lift now uses statistical modeling to enable measurement for conversion types that were previously unmeasurable, like store sales and offline leads. This provides a more comprehensive incremental Return on Ad Spend (iROAS), conversion value, and conversion count. This utilizes the results from your observed conversions and the data we have available from attribution reporting on conversions to model for the data we can't measure.
Sources supported through Supplementary Conversion Reporting:
- Store visits and store sales
- Enhanced conversions for apps or Firebase SDK: Use this or App conversion tracking through the app attribution partner framework (AAP) to track app conversion events. You can review detailed data diagnostics for these events within your app measurement platform.
Delayed Incremental Conversions
Starting April 14, 2026, eligible Demand Gen studies include "Delayed Incremental Conversion", also known as “Cooldown”. Many conversions happen after a study ends due to natural conversion lag. This feature projects conversions and values generated during a fixed period immediately following the study. It applies automatically to eligible Demand Gen only studies that started on or after March 2, 2026. Results are visible after the study finishes.
Best practices for measuring Conversion Lift
Campaign selection
- Best practice: We recommend including all campaigns that share the same type, audience, and targeting strategy.
- What it measures: A lift study calculates the incremental value your measured campaigns create on top of any other active marketing.
- Subset vs. All Campaigns: Measuring a subset tells you the specific value those exact campaigns add while others run. Measuring all active campaigns for a specific campaign type shows the total value of that entire advertising channel compared to no ads at all.
- Note: Measuring only a subset reduces your chances of detecting lift. This happens because holdback users might still see your unmeasured ads, and the extra value of a few campaigns is naturally smaller than your total campaign impact.
Holdout size
When you set up the study, the tool will provide a recommendation that allows you to maximize your chances of detecting lift. If you'd like to manually customize it, keep in consideration the following:
- The optimal holdout size depends on how much data you want to collect, and how quickly you'd like to do that.
- Higher holdouts (up to 50%) increase the sample, but also have a higher opportunity cost (not showing your ad to control users).
- Smaller holdouts will require you to have a longer study to collect enough samples to detect differences between baseline conversions and exposed groups.
Conversion categories
- Upper-funnel and mid-funnel conversion actions, such as pageviews or lead forms, show higher lift. They increase your likelihood of measuring clear results.
- We recommend measuring both bottom-funnel actions and upper-funnel or mid-funnel actions.
- Use upper-funnel actions as secondary KPIs to verify that people respond positively to your ads. This helps when your bottom-funnel actions don't have enough data.
Bidding strategies
- Campaigns using conversion-based or conversion-value-based bidding strategies have higher lift. These include Target CPA, Maximize Conversions, or Target ROAS.
- We recommend trying these strategies to verify if they lead to stronger lift for your campaigns.
Attribution model
- Campaigns using data-driven attribution are associated with higher lift. Our data-driven attribution model calibrates using incrementality signals.
- We recommend trying data-driven attribution when you optimize toward incremental conversions to verify if it leads to stronger lift.
Study duration
- Set your study duration to a length that captures your average conversion lag. This is the average time between an impression and a conversion.
- We allow studies as short as 7 days but typically recommend more than 14 days. This is especially true if your business has a longer conversion lag.
- Short purchase cycles, like ordering food, can run a short 7–14 day study. Expensive products, like travel accommodations, require more than 14 days.
- We've found up to a 17% drop in Absolute Lift in studies with a long conversion lag that run for less than 14 days. Because of this, we recommend running your study for a minimum of 14 days.
Frequency for running Conversion Lift studies
- Every incrementality study comes with an opportunity cost. By holding back a portion of your audience from your ads, you might miss out on driving incremental conversions.
- Be thoughtful about how frequently you run these studies. Study frequency tends to align with budget cycles.
- Test before you make major budget decisions or use studies to validate hypotheses from Media Mix Model results. This ensures the most accurate allocation of funds.
- Lift results fall within a confidence interval, so we encourage you to implement a testing plan to measure incrementality regularly.
- Based on historical data, most advertisers run about 1–2 studies per year.
- Talk with your account manager if incrementality optimization is your goal.
Creative matters
- Your creatives are what users view, and it compels them to convert. Stronger creatives lead to stronger incrementality.
- Align your ads with the goal you want to measure. Great ads start with the Core ABCD Principles:
- Attention: Hook and sustain attention with an immersive story
- Branding: Brand early, often, and richly
- Connection: Help people think or feel something
- Direction: Ask them to take action
Instructions
Set up Conversion Lift based on users
- Go to the Lift studies tab under “Campaigns > Experiments” within the Campaigns menu
.
- Select the plus
button.
- In the “Create your lift study” page, select Conversion Lift under “What do you want to measure?”, then select Continue.
- Under “How do you want your test groups to be created?”, select “Based on users”. Then, select Continue.
- Enter the name of your lift study.
- Under “Campaigns”, choose which campaigns you’d like to opt into Conversion Lift.
- Note: Campaigns can only be active in one study at a time. If you’re unable to select a campaign, it most likely means that it’s already being used in another study.
- Select from a list: Choose
Select Campaigns to choose specific campaigns from a list. Filter your campaigns based on eligibility, status, or type. You can select secondary filters including Campaign name, Between dates, Days active, or Minimum budget. You can also focus on your preferred attributes using the Columns
dropdown. After you’ve selected your campaigns, select Apply.
- Upload using a template: Choose
Select campaigns by upload to upload campaign IDs using a CSV file. You can use the linked template on the pop-up that appears.
- In the pop-up that opens, you may find one of these statuses:
- Eligible: Campaigns you can select for the lift study
- Needs attention: Campaigns that are inactive, part of another study, or incompatible with your chosen lift type
- Not found: Campaigns that aren't found
- If you make changes to the campaigns under “Needs Attention”, you’ll be prompted to refresh the pop-up page.
- After you’ve selected your campaigns, select Select campaigns.
- In the pop-up that opens, you may find one of these statuses:
- Choose specific conversion goals or keep the campaign defaults.
- To include supplementary conversions, select the conversion actions that have a “warning” icon
in the conversion type picker.
- To include supplementary conversions, select the conversion actions that have a “warning” icon
- Choose the type of metrics you want to focus on in the report for this study. The other type of metrics will still be available in the report.
- Conversions focuses on incremental conversions and incremental cost per action (iCPA)
- Conversion value focuses on the incremental conversion value and incremental return on ad spend (iROAS).
- Select the start and end dates for your study to update study duration.
- Update the size of the holdback by inputting a value from 1% to 50%.
- Note: If you’re running studies with Brand Lift and Search Lift you must leave the 30% holdback.
- Review the study power to get an estimate of the certainty of lift you can expect at the end of your study. For example, a study power of 70% to 80% means you can expect that if your study detects lift, the certainty in the detected lift will be between 70% and 80%.
- Note: Your study power is calculated based on the type of metrics you focus on. A study power above 90% likely means you'll find the most certain results at the end of your study. Changing the duration of your study and increasing your campaign budget will help you increase your study power. Additionally, you can increase your study power by increasing the study duration, your traffic split, and adding more conversion actions. Focusing on increased conversions and increased conversion value can affect your study power if the conversion values vary. Learn more about how to Understand Conversion Lift based on users measurement data.
- Select Create study. Your study will start on the date specified in the Lift study setting.
.
Select Campaigns to choose specific campaigns from a list. Filter your campaigns based on eligibility, status, or type. You can select secondary filters including Campaign name, Between dates, Days active, or Minimum budget. You can also focus on your preferred attributes using the Columns 
in the conversion type picker.View your Conversion Lift results
Conversion Lift measurement data is available for each lift study in the “Lift Measurement” table. You can also select a specific study to view more granular results.
Here’s how you view your Conversion Lift measurement data:
- Select the columns icon
.
- Select Modify columns.
- Select Conversion Lift, then select Apply.
- In the “Summary” and “Overall” tabs, the tab shows iROAS or iCPA values that include both observed incrementality and supplementary conversion.
- By default, the report shows results that include projected cool-down conversions. To see results without this modeling, you can click on the results tooltip
or view the reporting dashboard.
- For a more detailed breakdown, navigate to the “Conversion goal” tab to view results by category and a separate section for supplementary conversions.
.Frequently asked questions
What is the best approach for implementing a Conversion Lift study? How can I proceed and which specific campaigns would be most suitable?
You can set up studies based on users by following the instructions above, or Set up Conversion Lift based on geography.
To decide which campaigns are more suitable, you'll need to ask yourself what would you like to learn from this study, if you'd like to know “how much additional value are these Demand Gen creating, given that all your other campaigns are still running”, then choosing all Demand Gen campaigns would be the most suitable for you.
We recommend reaching out to your Google account representative to plan a learning agenda and decide which are the most relevant studies for you.
Can I add another lift measurement type (for example, Brand Lift) to an existing Conversion Lift study?
No, you can’t add another lift measurement to an ongoing study. You need to end your existing study and create a new one to include Brand Lift or Search Lift.
Can I stop and restart my study?
Yes, you can pause by changing the end date. When the study ends, you won’t be able to restart it.
Can I add or remove a campaign from an existing Conversion Lift study?
Yes, you can add and remove campaigns from an existing Conversion Lift study, but you can't add the same campaign to multiple studies.
Can I make changes to a Conversion Lift study that’s already running?
Yes, you can make changes to the end date, lift measurement type, add or remove campaigns.
Can I make changes to a campaign that is included in a Conversion Lift study that’s already running?
Yes you can but you should proceed with caution. We only recommend making changes which are business as usual (ex. Change bids or budgets). Updating creatives and audiences during the study might impact the performance of the study, and it will be hard to get learnings of what is working for your strategy.
What steps should ECL4App users follow when setting up a campaign?
To ensure accurate tracking and prevent overlapping data, ECL4App users should follow these steps during setup:
- Go to Lift studies, and click the plus
button.
- Select Conversion Lift then select Continue.
- Add a campaign.
- In the feasibility box, click the pencil icon
next to “Conversions”.
- Clear all of the conversions that overlap with ECL4App.
