Question from Reddit user:
Hi Everyone,
I have 5 campaigns in my account, I use submit leads account goal. In the goal there are two conversion actions, both a currently primary conversions. I want to put one of them as a secondary conversion in one of my campaigns.
Context: The two conversion actions are the same, they count a conversion when a user reaches the thank you page. But one is connected to GTM and the other Google Analytics. Essentially each conversion is duplicated. It was set up like this when I got the account, now I cleaning up the account.
My end goal is the put one of the conversion actions at secondary across the entire account. Before I do so I want to check the impact of performance if I do so.
Is there an option to change this from only one campaign, if I do custom is selects the entire goal with both and won’t let me choose the specific conversion action.
Any recommendations welcome. Thank you.
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
You are correct that the Google Ads interface, when using Account-default goals, doesn’t allow you to change the Primary/Secondary status for an individual conversion action within a specific campaign; it applies the goal’s setting to all campaigns by default.
To achieve your goal of testing the impact of one conversion action as Secondary in only one campaign, you must first create a Custom goal that includes both conversion actions, but set the one you want to test to Secondary.
Then, you apply this Custom goal to only the one campaign, overriding the Account-default goal settings.
Once testing is complete, you can safely set the duplicated conversion action to Secondary at the Account level.
The long answer is:
Your situation of having duplicated conversion actions – one sourced from GTM and one from Google Analytics, both tracking the exact same thank you page event – is a classic scenario that leads to inflated conversion counts and can confuse the smart bidding algorithms.
Your plan to move one to Secondary is the correct approach for cleaning up the account.
To address your immediate need to test the impact of this change in only one campaign before rolling it out account-wide, you need to exploit the hierarchy of goal settings in Google Ads.
Since the Account-default goal setting for the submit leads goal currently has both conversion actions set to Primary, that setting is inherited by all five campaigns.
To test the change in a single campaign, you must create a Custom goal.
You’ll build this Custom goal by selecting both of your thank you page conversion actions.
Crucially, within this new Custom goal, you set the duplicate conversion action (the one you plan to deprecate) to Secondary.
You then go to the Settings of the one campaign you want to test, navigate to Goals, and choose the option to Use campaign-specific conversion goals.
Select your newly created Custom goal to apply it only to that campaign, overriding the Account-default goal.
This allows the campaign’s smart bidding to optimize based on the Primary conversion action, while still recording the Secondary one for comparison.
After your testing period, when you confirm performance stability, you can go to the Account-default goal settings and change the duplicated conversion action to Secondary for the entire account, then revert your test campaign back to using the Account-default goal.
This level of precise testing and management, especially for complex accounts, can be greatly enhanced by moving to an API-driven solution.
An excellent, long-term solution involves setting up a data pipeline using the Google Ads API and the Google Analytics Data API.
The Google Ads API allows you to programmatically manage conversion settings at the campaign level, enabling you to create and apply Custom goals across campaigns in bulk, which is far more efficient than the manual interface.
Furthermore, by coupling this with the Google Analytics Data API and a server-side solution like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, you create a robust data validation system.
This server-side tagging setup ensures that the conversion event (the purchase or generate_lead standard event) is sent once and accurately to both Google Analytics and Google Ads, eliminating the need for duplicated, client-side tracking setup via GTM in the first place, thus preventing this entire issue in the future.
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