Is there any benefit to adding every step from a complex checkout as conversions in Google Ads? Or only start and completion?
Hey fellow PPC nerds,
I’m currently running Google Ads for an insurance company, and we have a complex checkout process—about 9 steps where users fill in various details about their person and life.
Right now, I’m tracking form completion as the primary conversion (naturally) and form start as a secondary conversion to analyze drop-off.
But here’s my question: Is there any real benefit in tracking all the intermediate steps (like steps 2 through 8) as conversions in Google Ads? Is this something the algorithm/bidding can actually work with?
Note that I will measure the behaviour and drop off anyways in GA4. So it’s really about th emarketing side of things.
Has anyone experimented with this? Did it improve performance, or did it just add noise?
Would love to hear insights from people who’ve tested this approach!
The short answer is:
Absolutely, tracking all intermediate steps as micro-conversions in Google Ads can be highly beneficial, especially for a complex, high-value checkout like insurance, and the algorithm can work with it, but you need to feed it correctly, often through conversion values.
Track form start and form completion as Primary Conversions for bidding, and the intermediate steps as Secondary Actions with carefully assigned conversion values to help Smart Bidding understand the user’s progression and likelihood of completing the form.
The long answer is:
While you will definitely track drop-off in GA4, feeding those intermediate steps back into Google Ads gives the Smart Bidding algorithm a much richer, earlier signal to optimize against, which is especially powerful for long checkout processes.
If a user completes step 7 out of 9, they are significantly more valuable than a user who only completed step 2, and Smart Bidding needs to know that.
The key is to assign a unique conversion value to each step.
For example, if a form completion is worth $100, form start might be $5, step 2 is $10, step 3 is $20, and so on, incrementally increasing the value up to $90 for step 8.
You should set the form completion as a Primary Conversion (your main goal) and all the intermediate steps (including form start) as Secondary Actions with these values.
By doing this, you are teaching the algorithm which users are showing high intent early on, allowing it to bid more aggressively and efficiently.
The intermediate steps are micro-conversions that act as leading indicators of your final macro-conversion.
For tracking, setting up these many micro-conversions directly can get messy and inefficient.
An excellent and cheap solution is to use the Google Ads API combined with Google Tag Manager and a server-side tagging solution like Stape or even a custom Google Cloud Platform function.
Instead of firing many Standard Events from the browser, you fire a single Custom Event to your server (via Stape or GCP) for each step completion.
The server then processes this event and uses the Google Ads API to send the Conversion Event along with the correct, dynamically determined conversion value directly to Google Ads.
This approach is more reliable because it bypasses browser limitations, respects privacy settings, ensures accurate conversion values, and keeps your Google Ads interface clean by feeding only the essential, high-quality data that Smart Bidding can use effectively.
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