Conversion tracking is critical to your success in online marketing. Setting up conversion tracking allows you to see the valuable actions that users take after interacting with your ad, like purchases, sign ups, and phone calls.

What is conversion tracking?

Conversion tracking is the method advertisers use to identify and record valuable actions to their business within their Google Ads account.

By setting up conversion tracking, advertisers give the Google algorithm the information it needs to understand what drives success in an account.

How does the algorithm gather these signals?

These conversion actions can either be imported from Google Analytics or tracked via the Google Ads pixel. And regardless of how you track your conversions, advertisers can add as many actions they find valuable.

Once these conversion actions are defined in the platform, Google will record a conversion each time a user completes one of those actions.

What does the algorithm do with these signals?

As your account builds up conversion data, the algorithm starts to learn about these successful signals. And as these learnings are significant, the algorithm optimizes your ad delivery as you are eligible for placements in the ad auction.

Without this conversion data, the algorithm is blind to the information most advertisers care most about—growing their business or client’s account by optimizing their delivery from Google Ads.

Enter campaign-level conversion setting

So why did Google introduce this change to bidding? Google states that over 70% of their advertisers are using automated bidding today. And to that stat, they say:

“And while many of you have told us that Smart Bidding has helped drive better performance, you’ve also asked for more flexibility to reach your business goals.”

What is campaign-level conversion setting?

Campaign-level conversion setting is a way for advertisers to select which of their conversion actions the algorithm should track and optimize towards for a campaign.

So what’s different?

As I touched on above, with the account-level conversion setting, each of the conversion actions in a given account add together to populate your conversion metrics.

Now, with the campaign-level conversion setting, Google is giving advertisers the ability to specify which action(s) should populate your conversion data.

Meaning that this new setting simply gives Google more information about which conversion actions are most relevant to track and optimize towards.

Setting up campaign-level conversion tracking

To start leveraging this new setting, you can navigate to your campaign settings and click into the conversion drop down.

Once you select to “choose conversion action for this campaign,” you will see all of your conversion actions pop up with the ability to select the specific action(s).

What can you expect with campaign-level conversions?

As you’ve read and seen in our performance, you can expect this setting to have the potential to improve your results. But, before jumping right into this new setting, you do need to consider the impact that the change will have on your account performance.

Short conclusion

This can also help solve the need to set up different accounts to manage separate marketing budgets. Google explains with this scenario:

For example, suppose you’re a hotel group with separate marketing budgets for the different chains of hotels, and different campaigns targeting online bookings for separate chains.

Now you can simply choose the corresponding conversion action(s) for each chain and ensure their budgets are delivering the valuable actions they were intended to drive.