Improve Your Google Ads Performance With Conversion Action Sets

Paid digital media campaigns often focus on conversions – measurable and key action points on your website that you want to optimize your campaigns towards to drive more of those results, and at the best cost. Typically a number of conversions will be tracked on one website or landing page – like a form submission, a click to call, or signing up for a newsletter. Some conversions being tracked may also be ‘softer’ like engagement points – button clicks or PDF downloads for example.

Google has recently added a new feature that allows advertisers to hone in on certain conversions when optimizing their campaigns. In this blog, we take you through how to get the most of this new feature – conversion action sets.

What are conversion action sets?

With conversion action sets, you can create a set of conversion actions that you can use in campaign settings in Google Ads to select which conversions to optimize for and count in the “Conversions” column at the campaign level. These sets of conversion actions can also be shared across a group of campaigns, which are all intended to drive the same actions.

Google has announced that campaign-level conversion settings are now available in both search and display campaigns. This is a great feature when working on multiple campaigns with different conversions and objectives. And this means Smart Bidding can now optimize towards the right conversion action or even a Conversion Action Set for each campaign.

Before June of this year, all conversions were set at account level as default and applied to all campaigns. But surely, different campaigns don’t always serve the same goals i.e. to drive downloads, sign-ups, purchases etc.

Now you can simply choose within campaign level settings which conversion action to optimize that campaign towards when using Smart Bidding target cost per acquisition (CPA) or Target return on ad spend (ROAS).

This will override the account level conversion setting for the selected campaigns. Other conversions can still be seen in the “All conversions” column and a breakdown of the individual conversion performance within the action set for each campaign can be seen when breaking down by Segment > Conversion type.

When should you use conversion action sets?

Conversion action sets allow you to group your primary conversion actions together across multiple accounts or at the campaign level rather than at the account level.  

When you implement conversion action sets by specifying which conversions to use for each campaign, these actions will be the only ones reported in the conversions column for their respective campaigns. This also allows for each campaign to optimize for its respective conversion actions.

You would likely use this type of conversion grouping when you have multiple conversion actions in your account (more as secondary conversions), but only want to optimize toward your primary goal for each campaign.

How to use campaign-level conversions and conversion action sets along with Smart Bidding

Smart Bidding optimizes towards whatever is in the “Conversions” column. After deciding which conversions or conversion action sets you want to be counted in the “Conversions” column at campaign level, should you update the tCPA or ROAS immediately with the new target or gradually adjust over time?

As Smart Bidding takes time to adjust to changes, sudden big changes might cause high fluctuations in spend. Given this, it’s advisable to update your targets gradually rather than by a significant amount at once.

Besides, Google recommends to use the same set of conversion actions across multiple campaigns or use ‘Include in’ Conversions setting when possible. This makes sense since the larger the set of conversion data, the better for learnings.

In sum, campaign-level conversions, conversion action sets and Smart Bidding are winning solutions for accounts with multiple conversion actions. These features not only save you time, make conversions more organized and more granularly controlled, but also increase the flexibility of Smart Bidding and help manage your bids more effectively!