【Google Ads】Primary Conversions and Secondary Conversions

One of the most powerful features of Google Ads is its machine learning capabilities, which effectively analyzes what factors work for your campaign’s goals and automatically optimizes accordingly to help advertisers get the best results.

However, in order to achieve these results, it is very important to ensure that Google is trained correctly. This means that advertisers should tell the system what results you want, which is where primary and secondary conversions come into play.

I get a lot of questions about the difference between primary and secondary conversions and when to use them, so today I will give a brief overview here.

What are primary and secondary conversions? Which actions should be set as primary conversions?

When setting up Google conversion tracking, you will see that you can set different conversion action events as “primary” or “secondary” conversions.

When you go into the “Goals” settings of your Google Ads account, you can see which conversion events Google is tracking. Under “Optimization”, some events are listed as “primary” and some are listed as “secondary”.

The primary action is the action reported in the “Conversions” column in Google Ads reports. The primary action goal is used to bid for a specific campaign, and the bidding system will accelerate the learning of the primary action’s conversion data to enable smart bidding capabilities. The events of primary actions are mainly result events.

Secondary conversions are for observation only. They appear in the “All Conversions” report column and are not used for bidding purposes. In general, the events of secondary actions are mainly process events.

Data for secondary conversions is also important

For example: purchase data is the data that advertisers want Google to bid and optimize, but advertisers still want to track the number of processes such as checkouts initiated and added to shopping carts.

Comparing the number of data such as checkouts initiated and added to shopping carts with the number of orders actually purchased helps us understand which link in the entire user conversion lifecycle is broken, so we can effectively test and solve it.

Summary

Understanding how to use the Google system correctly (and how to train it to work for you instead of against you) is as important as how to create great Google ads. If Google optimizes for the wrong events, even the best ads will fail, and setting up primary and secondary conversions correctly is the most important part of it.