Question from Reddit user:
For some reason each conversion tag I create shows across all campaigns.
I’m going nuts trying to figure it out and it’s completely screwing with my results.
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
The reason every conversion tag you create shows across all campaigns is that Google Ads conversions are designed to measure a final user action for the entire account, regardless of which specific campaign or ad group drove the click.
This is the default, account-wide setting.
The direct solution is to use the Conversions setting at the campaign level and select which conversion actions to include in the optimization, effectively overriding the account default for those specific campaigns.
The long answer is:
I totally understand your frustration, as this is a common point of confusion.
By default, Google Ads conversions are measured at the account level, meaning any conversion you set up will show up in the reporting column for every campaign in that account, even if only one campaign could have logically driven it.
This is usually fine for reporting, but it causes a big problem when it comes to optimization and bidding, as the system will try to optimize all campaigns for all available conversions.
To fix this and assign a conversion to a specific campaign, you need to use the Campaign-specific conversion settings.
You do this by going into the Settings for the specific campaign you want to control.
Under the Goals section, you should find an option to Use campaign-specific conversion settings instead of the account-level settings.
Once enabled, you can then select the specific conversion actions that are relevant to that campaign and that you want the campaign’s bidding strategy to optimize for.
This ensures that only the conversions relevant to Campaign A are used for its Smart Bidding, while Campaign B might be optimized for a completely different conversion.
A superior, more advanced and scalable solution that gives you programmatic control is to use a server-side architecture involving the Google Ads API, Google Tag Manager, and a server-side container hosted on a platform like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
With this setup, you can use GTM to collect client-side information and pass it to your server container.
When a conversion event occurs, your server can use the Google Ads API to retrieve the full click path and campaign data associated with the user.
Crucially, before sending the final conversion event to Google Ads, the server can apply business logic that checks the original campaign’s ID or name.
If, for instance, the campaign ID matches a list of IDs designated for a specific conversion goal (like a lead_form_submit from a particular campaign), the server can then send the conversion to Google Ads with a conversion label that is specific to a conversion action linked only to that campaign.
Furthermore, the Google Ads API allows you to programmatically manage your campaign settings, meaning you could use a script to automatically go into the settings of a new campaign and select the correct, campaign-specific conversion action, ensuring your optimization settings are always correct without manual intervention.
This moves conversion mapping from a manual, error-prone interface setting to a fully automated, resilient data pipeline.
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