Conversion goals

Conversion goals help you organize your conversion actions so that you can more easily optimize toward your advertising objectives. Goals are organized and identified by the unique combinations of category and origin in the set of ConversionActions in your account's effective conversion account.

Key Point: In the Google Ads UI goal management tabs, the origin attribute is labeled Conversion source. The Google Ads API uses the term origin to clearly differentiate between this attribute and the Source field in the UI Conversion actions tab.

Goal management overview

Conversion goals are organized in a hierarchy. Customer goals define the default goals for your entire account, while campaign goals override the customer goals for campaigns with specific bidding and optimization requirements.

The goal management workflow is as follows:

1. Create a ConversionAction.

   When you create the conversion action, Google Ads will automatically perform the following steps:

   • Create a CustomerConversionGoal for the conversion action's category and origin if one doesn't already exist.
   • Create a CampaignConversionGoal for each campaign and the conversion action's category and origin if one doesn't already exist.
   • Configure the biddable attribute of the CustomerConversionGoal and CampaignConversionGoal objects according to various rules covered later in this guide series.
   Note: Your account already has CustomerConversionGoal and CampaignConversionGoal objects for your existing conversion actions.

2. Update the CustomerConversionGoal objects that Google Ads created automatically to align with your objectives. Set biddable to true to bid and optimize towards ConversionActions with the goal's category and origin, and false otherwise. Google Ads will automatically apply these updates to every campaign where you have not explicitly updated campaign goals or applied custom goals.

3. If you have a campaign with unique goals that differ from your customer-level goals, configure its CampaignConversionGoal using one or both of the following steps.

   • Use update operations to modify the biddable attribute of any CampaignConversionGoal objects where the goal should differ from the customer-level goals.

   • If configuring the campaign's goals by category and origin does not suffice, use specific conversion actions for bidding and optimization by creating a CustomConversionGoal and updating the campaign's ConversionGoalCampaignConfig.

   As a result of the update operations, Google Ads will ensure that the goal_config_level of the campaign's ConversionGoalCampaignConfig is set to CAMPAIGN, and will no longer apply CustomerConversionGoal updates to the campaign's CampaignConversionGoal objects.

   If you want to transition the campaign back to using customer-level goals, set goal_config_level to CUSTOMER. Google Ads will modify its CampaignConversionGoal to match CustomerConversionGoal, and as long as goal_config_level remains set to CUSTOMER, will apply any changes to CustomerConversionGoal to the campaign's CampaignConversionGoal. The campaign will no longer use any CustomConversionGoals.

Key Point: Since Google Ads automatically creates CustomerConversionGoal, CampaignConversionGoal, and ConversionGoalCampaignConfig objects in your account, you can only update those objects. The Google Ads API does not support creating or removing those objects.

Mutate requirements

When mutating a CustomerConversionGoal or CustomConversionGoal object, the customer_id of the request must match the ID of your account's effective conversion account.

In contrast, when mutating a CampaignConversionGoal or ConversionGoalCampaignConfig object, the customer_id of the request must match the customer_id of your Google Ads account's Customer resource.

Conversion action settings

Although goals are organized by category and origin, you can set the primary_for_goal attribute of each ConversionAction to indicate the role it should play in bidding and how the action's conversions will appear in reports.

• If primary_for_goal is true:

  • Google Ads will include the conversion action in bidding based on the biddable attribute of customer and campaign goals for the conversion action's category and origin.
  • Google Ads will include the conversion action's conversions and conversion values in Conversions (metrics.conversions), All conv. (metrics.all_conversions), and their related fields in reports.

• If primary_for_goal is false:

  • Google Ads will not include the conversion action in bidding or Conversions unless you use the conversion action in a CustomConversionGoal. You can still find the conversion action's conversions and conversion values in All conv. (metrics.all_conversions) and its related fields in reports.

  Check out the campaign goals guide in this series for more details.

Important: The include_in_conversions_metric attribute of ConversionAction is deprecated. When managing your conversion actions, set the primary_for_goal attribute instead, and transition any of your reporting or application logic that relies on include_in_conversions_metric to use primary_for_goal.