How to Setup Google Ads Conversion Action Sets

June 24, 2019

You have a well-running account that you’ve been perfecting over time. It is generating a healthy volume of leads for your business. You’ve taken advantage of Google’s smart bidding settings, allowing you to customize targeting and bids based on multiple user signals. What’s next?

Take optimization a step further with the newly released (Google Marketing Live 2019) Google Ads feature, “Conversion Action Sets”. Conversion action sets allow your Smart Bidding strategies to optimize towards specific conversions at the campaign level (meaning each campaign can now have different conversion goals setup!)

Using Conversion Action Sets will be a good way to manage budgets by various business goals.

One month, for example, when sales are slow and your business goal is to fill the sales funnel with as many qualified leads as possible, an advertiser can choose to run the campaigns focusing on form fills (PS – check out Paperform for a great form builder to capture more form fills  on your website) and calls. Another month, when there is a bit more budget, a business can spend on prospecting and filling up the top of the funnel with new visitors and repopulating remarketing audiences.

There are other use cases too! For instance, when various product campaigns, and/or business line campaigns are running in the same account, we can now support their different goals without having to make a new Google Ads account.

It is important to adjust your tCPA when narrowing or expanding your conversion set. For instance, if conversions were $50 each on average, and you’ve expanded campaigns to target the top of the funnel email and newsletter signups, you’ll need to prune down your tCPA bids over time to better accommodate for these lower value/top of funnel events.

Find the new conversion setting when you navigate into advanced campaign settings in the individual campaign that you’d like to setup to use the new conversion action set:

As you click on “Select conversion action” you’ll be able to select specific conversions to target into a set (which you’d want to name at this point) like the example below:

At this point you should be able to see your new Conversion Set this like:

Save the set for targeting and you can re-use it for other campaigns as well.

In addition to account-level conversion sets, one can set up MCC-level conversion sets that can be used to switch campaign targeting across multiple accounts faster.

Keep in mind that this new campaign conversion setting lets you override the account-level “Include in Conversions” setting and specify conversion actions for a particular campaign (or group of campaigns). However, the Google Ads help page also mentions that, whenever possible, it’s best to use the account-level “include in Conversions” settings to represent your primary goal as all new campaigns will default to the account-level configuration.  So I’d still keep including all actions that matter to your business in account-level  as “Conversions,” and switch the conversion action sets back and forth depending on the goals at any given time for campaigns.

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