Question from Reddit user:
A purchase of an event ticket is my macro conversion and to date these are the only conversions I have been tracking in Google Ads.
Someone has recently suggested that I should be also be tracking macro conversions in Google Ads – such as clicks on the ‘get tickets’ button on our website.
Is there any benefit in doing this? Or any harm?
My concern would be that by adding in additional signals the smart bidding system begins to optimise toward the wrong goal since much more people are going to click ‘get tickets’ than purchase a ticket.
What is the recommended best practice?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
Yes, you absolutely should track both your macro conversion (the purchase) and your micro conversion (the get_tickets button click), but you must use the Conversions setting in Google Ads to clearly designate the purchase event as your Primary action for bidding optimization, while setting the get_tickets click as a Secondary action (Observation only).
This setup provides the smart bidding system with high-volume, early-funnel data to learn and optimize more quickly, without the risk of accidentally bidding toward the less valuable micro conversion.
The long answer is:
Your concern that adding the ‘get tickets’ click as a conversion might confuse Smart Bidding is well-founded, as historically this was a legitimate risk.
However, Google Ads introduced a feature specifically to address this: the distinction between Primary and Secondary conversion actions.
Best practice is to track both.
Your macro conversion, the purchase of a ticket, is your Primary conversion action.
This is the event you tell Smart Bidding to optimize your bids for, and it is the event that determines your ultimate CPA or ROAS.
Your micro conversion, the get_tickets button click, is an early-stage signal that demonstrates user intent and is highly correlated with a final purchase but occurs much more frequently.
You should track this event, but set it as a Secondary conversion action in Google Ads.
When an action is set to Secondary, it is included in your Conversions column in reporting, which is great for visibility and analysis, but it is not used by Smart Bidding for automatic bidding strategies like Target CPA or Maximize Conversions.
This dual-tracking approach benefits you because micro conversions provide the Smart Bidding system with high-volume data early in the user’s journey, allowing it to learn which users are most likely to convert much faster than if it only waited for the less frequent macro conversion.
This is particularly useful for campaigns that have low purchase volume.
To ensure the most reliable, accurate, and flexible tracking of both your purchase and get_tickets events, especially in a modern environment with privacy restrictions, a server-side tagging solution using the Google Ads API is an excellent choice.
You would use Google Tag Manager to capture both the get_tickets click and the final purchase event and send them to a server-side container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
From there, you use the Google Ads API to send these first-party conversion events directly to Google Ads.
This process guarantees that the data is not lost due to ad blockers or cookie restrictions, resulting in a cleaner, more complete conversion signal.
By using the API, you ensure that Google Ads has the best possible data fidelity for both the high-value purchase event and the high-volume get_tickets event, allowing you to confidently use the Primary/Secondary setting for optimal Smart Bidding performance.
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