Using conversion goals to guide new campaigns

To make sure that your new campaign selections are optimal and help meet your advertising objectives, you’ll identify your advertising objectives at the start of campaign creation. If your advertising objective is 'Sales', 'Leads', 'Website traffic', 'Local shop visits' or 'Custom', you’ll then have the opportunity to add conversion goals for the campaign.

If you have default goals for your account, called account-default goals, the list of those goals will be proposed as the default set of goals when you’re selecting conversion goals for the new campaign.

If you don’t have any account-default goals in your account, you may find suggestions for creating new account-default goals. These suggestions will be added to your new campaign and all other campaigns that are using the default list of account-level goals.

While you build your campaign, you can also add additional standard goals, add a single custom conversion goal or do both. You can also remove account-default goals from the campaign. If you alter your account-default goal list for any campaign, that particular campaign won't benefit from cross-campaign learning which could result in decreased performance. It's generally recommended that you use 'account-default' goals for most campaigns.

Note: Custom goals may be less relevant to your advertising objective, and because of this, won’t always provide the same level of campaign optimisation as the recommended account-default conversion goals.

Apply conversion goals to a new campaign

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. Click Campaigns in the left navigation menu.
3. Click the plus button .
4. Click New campaign in the drop-down menu.
5. Select your advertising objective for the campaign.
   • Sales: Drive sales online, in app, by phone or in store.
   • Leads: Get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action.
   • Website traffic: Get the right people to visit your website.
   • Product or brand consideration: Encourage people to explore your products or services.
   • Brand awareness and reach: Reach a broad audience and build awareness.
   • App promotion: Get more installs, interactions and pre-registration for your app.
6. (Applicable if your advertising objective is 'Sales', 'Leads', 'Website traffic', 'Local shop visits', or 'Custom'). The account-default goals presented in this step have been automatically suggested. If you accept all of them (recommended), you can move forward to the next steps.
   Note: If you haven’t set up conversion tracking yet, you’ll be prompted to set up conversion tracking after you've selected your conversion goal. Learn how to set up conversion tracking.
   1. If you don’t have any account-default conversion goals to select from, you can create them as new account-default goals for this campaign and other ones.
      1. Select the ways that you‘d like to reach your goals, for example 'website visits' or 'phone calls'.
      2. Click Create a conversion action.
      3. Once your conversion action has been created, you’ll need to start tracking your conversions. Click Installation options to find out how you can install the conversion tracking code and follow the instructions based on your selection.
   2. To change the conversion goals for this new campaign:
      Note: Read what happens if I don’t use account-default goals for more information about the implications of bidding towards goals other than your account-default goals.
      1. You can remove any account-default goals that you don’t want the campaign to optimise for.
      2. You can add any additional standard goals in the goals menu that aren’t account-default goals, but that you would like this campaign to bid towards.
      3. You can add up to one custom goal (created from the conversions summary). Custom goals are goals that you can create and add any combination of conversion actions to, but are only recommended for more advanced use cases.
         • You can’t add multiple custom goals for a single campaign, so if you need to add more conversions to a goal, you'll need to add them to an existing custom goal or create a new custom goal which combines all of the actions you'll need.
      4. Click Save changes.
   Note: On the campaigns overview page, primary actions (and those included in custom goals) are included in the 'Conversions' column, and secondary actions are included in the 'All conv.' column. Learn more about conversion actions.
7. Proceed with campaign set up, including selection of campaign type, bid and budget.

What happens if I don’t use account-level goals for a campaign?

If you set up a campaign that has chosen any other set of goals beyond the recommended account-default goals, then this campaign primarily optimises for that specific set of goals. These campaigns will still benefit from cross-campaign learnings, but to a lesser extent as compared to campaigns that use account-level goals.

If you’ve created a campaign that uses any set of goals instead of your account-default goals, but you’d like to revert to account-default goals, you can do so by clicking 'Use account goals' in the campaign settings.