This article explains how to manage campaign-specific conversion goals in your Google Ads campaigns.
The campaign-specific goals setting allows you to override your account-default goals and specify which goals you’d like to track in your conversion reporting and use for bidding in a particular campaign.
How it works
Your account-default goals should be applicable to most of your campaigns, but there may be some situations when you want to have more granular control over which conversion goals are used for bidding and reporting in a campaign.
Example
You sell shoes on your website and have two different conversion actions in your account default goal, one tracking add to cart actions and another tracking shoe purchases. For your campaign focused solely on selling shoes, you might consider using the campaign-specific conversion setting to include only shoe purchases. This will allow your campaign to only optimize toward the most relevant conversion action.
Note: If you have several conversion actions that deliver different values to your business, instead of using the campaign level conversion setting, report on all the conversion actions at the account-level and use Target ROAS or Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy with different values assigned to each action to optimize effectively without any data loss.
We also recommend using all account-level goals because any changes made to your account-level goals won’t be applied to your campaigns that aren’t strictly using account-level goals.
When applying campaign-specific goals you can either use the standard goals that Google provides or create a totally custom goal.
Standard goals
You can choose which standard conversion goals to apply to a specific campaign. You can customize which standard goals to apply to a specific campaign using the campaign-specific goals setting. For example, you may have set both “purchase” and “add to cart” as account-default goals but would like to measure only the “purchase” goal for one of your campaigns.
Custom goals
If none of the standard goals in your account meet your exact needs, you can create a custom goal to apply to a specific campaign. Custom goals can include any combination of primary and secondary conversion actions. You may wish to use custom goals in rare situations when you have a non-standard advertising objective.
If you’d like, you can apply a combination of custom goals and standard goals to your campaign. Note that you can only use one custom goal per campaign.
In general, it’s best to use your account-default goals across all your campaigns rather than creating campaign-specific goals since this allows your campaigns to learn from one another which can improve bidding.
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. When you apply your custom goal to a campaign, the campaign will optimize for both conversion actions.
Using the conversions setting with Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding (including target CPA and Target ROAS bidding strategies), considers only conversions reported in the "Conversions" column when optimizing towards your target. Google's AI bidding models take time to adapt to any changes you make to your conversion configuration. This is true both at the account level and at the campaign level. If you decide to change your conversion goals at the campaign-level using the Conversions setting (Search) or the Conversion goals setting (Shopping), you should update your targets gradually over time as the bidding models adjust to newly reported conversions data. Otherwise, you may have unwanted fluctuations in spend. Note that Smart campaigns only optimize for a smaller set of goals.
Store visits differ from other conversions in that Smart Bidding will react immediately to adding or removing the store visits conversion goal. You should update your targets as soon as store visits are added or removed from the "Conversions" column.
Example: At the account-level, you include purchases that have a historical cost per action (CPA) of $100 in the "Conversions" column. You decide that you’d like to include signups (which are a more frequent user action and thus have a lower CPA) in the "Conversions" column for a specific campaign rather than purchases. When you change your conversions setting at the campaign-level to include only signups in the "Conversions" column, instead of setting a much lower target CPA right away, you adjust your target CPA down gradually over time to keep your campaign spend roughly stable.
Create campaign-specific conversion goals
Instructions
To apply campaign-specific conversion goals:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
.
- Click the Campaigns drop down.
- Click Campaigns, and select the campaign that you want to add conversion goals to.
- Click the Settings tab.
- Click the Goals drop down in the settings menu.
- Click Use Campaign-specific goal settings.
- Select the conversion goals you want.
- Click Save.
You can also edit campaign-specific conversions setting in bulk from the "Campaigns" table:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
- Click the Campaigns drop down.
- Click Campaigns,and go to the Campaigns table.
- Select the campaigns for which you want to edit the campaign-specific conversions setting.
- Click Edit.
- Select Update conversion goals from the dropdown menu.
To quickly view the conversion goals for all of your campaigns, you can add the "Conversion goals" column to your "Campaigns" table:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Campaigns icon
- Click the Campaigns drop down.
- Click Campaigns.
- Click the "Columns" icon
.
- Click Modify columns.
- Click Attributes.
- Select Conversion goals.
- Click Apply.
To create a custom goal:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Goals icon
.
- Click the Conversions drop down.
- Click Summary.
- In the conversions summary, scroll to the bottom of the page and click to expand the Custom Goals section.
- Click Add Custom Goal.