About primary and secondary conversion actions

Conversion goals are only available to customers who have migrated to the new Search Ads 360 experience. Check the experience hub to stay up to date on your available features, including conversion goals.

In Search Ads 360, actions that you want your customers to take, or conversion actions, are grouped together into conversion goals. For example, the 'Purchase' conversion goal contains all your conversion actions in which customers make a purchase.

When you set up conversion tracking, you will be selecting primary and secondary conversion actions that support a defined goal:

• Primary actions: These are conversion actions that are reported in the 'Conversions' column in your reports and used for bidding, as long as the standard goal that they are part of is used for bidding.
• Secondary actions: These conversion actions are for observation only. They are used for reporting in the 'All conversions' column in your reports but not for bidding, even if the goal that they are included in is used for bidding. The one exception is if the secondary action is part of a custom goal, in which case it's used for bidding. 

• Most, but not all, conversion actions can be set to either primary or secondary. For example, shop sales direct conversion actions can't be set to primary, and shop visits can't be set to secondary.
• Shop sales direct conversion actions can't be used for bidding, even if included as part of a custom goal.
• You can't bid to both shop visits and shop sales goals at the same time. You must select one or the other. If you want to switch between the 2 goals, you must first remove one and then add the desired goal. For example, remove shop visits as a goal first and then add shop sales.

Example

You may have a standard goal called 'purchases' that's applied by default to campaigns in your account. Within your 'purchases' goal, you may have 2 conversion actions: 

• A 'subscription' conversion action that you've marked as 'primary'.
• A 'one-off purchase' conversion action that you've marked as 'secondary'. The primary action will be reported in the 'Conversions' column and used for bidding in all campaigns that use your 'purchases' goal. The secondary action will be used for observation only.

Conversion actions included in a custom goal are used for reporting and bidding, regardless of whether they're set as primary or secondary actions. There can be exceptions to this such as the shop sales direct conversion action, which can't be used for bidding, even if used in a custom goal. For example, if you add your 'one-off purchase' secondary conversion action to a custom goal, the 'one-off purchase' action will automatically be used for reporting and bidding in any campaign that uses your custom goal, even though it's marked as secondary.

Update the primary and secondary setting for a conversion action 

Manage your conversion goals on the conversions summary page. To view the conversions summary page, sign in to your new Search Ads 360 experience and then do one of the following:

• To view Search Ads 360 conversion goals:
  1. Navigate to a sub-manager account.
  2. Click the tools and settings icon and then click Conversions.
• To view Google Ads conversion goals:
  1. Navigate to a Google Ads client account.
  2. Click the tools and settings icon and then click Conversions.

In the conversions summary, standard goals and their grouped conversion actions are displayed automatically. These goals are created based on your conversion actions. Custom goals are displayed at the bottom of the page. 

In the conversions summary, find the goal that includes the conversion action that you'd like to edit.

1. Click Edit goal.
2. Next to the conversion action that you want to update, click the drop-down and select either Primary action or Secondary action.
3. Click Save changes.

Related links

• About conversion goals
• Set a conversion goal in a campaign