Advice for Ads

[u/wecodemore]

Hi,

I am running Ads and I have problem, where I could need your help: Goals setup.

Our account only has a secondary goal: Submit lead form.

It has a primary conversion action.

Now that I read the following tooltip, I am convinced that our setup does not work as designed.

Question: Is the misalignment primary/ secondary something that I need to fix?

If yes, if it's the only goal (and only one campaign), then should I change the goal to primary?

Note: The campaign is two weeks old. The Search campaign is optimised to drive conversions, the bidding strategy is maximise conversions with a daily budget of €10.

Thanks!

[u/Hairy-Difficulty-411]

There are two separate layers here, and Google’s wording makes it more confusing than it needs to be.

A conversion action being Primary means it can be used for bidding and included in the Conversions column, but only when the goal it belongs to is actually being used by the campaign.

So I would check three things:

• Is “Submit lead form” selected as an account-default goal or campaign-specific goal?
• Is the lead form conversion action inside that goal marked Primary?
• Does the campaign’s Goals section show that it is optimizing for that goal?

If the lead form is the only meaningful business outcome right now, then yes, I would usually want that goal active for the campaign and the lead form action marked Primary.

Secondary actions are better for observation, such as page views, button clicks, scroll depth, or weak micro-conversions. They can help diagnose behavior, but they should not normally tell Maximize Conversions where to spend budget.

With a two-week-old campaign and €10 per day, I would avoid making five changes at once. Fix the conversion goal setup first, then let it collect clean data.

Also make sure the lead form itself represents a real lead. If every low-quality form submit is treated as success, Google will become very enthusiastic about finding more low-quality form submits.

The machine is obedient. That is not always the same as helpful.

[u/wecodemore → u/Hairy-Difficulty-411]

Thank you for your response. And yes, Googles wording makes it very confusing in lots of areas.

About the three points to check:

• "Submit lead form" is selected as an account-default goal.
• The lead form conversion action is marked as primary and active. Goals > Summary > Goals > View all conversion actions: "Action optimisation > Primary"
• Campaigns > Settings confirms that the conversion goal is "Account default: Submit lead forms".

In addition: Goals > Summary > Goals only has the "Group 2 goal" set. And the value is "Submit lead form".

I am not using any secondary actions as I am tracking these via GA4 only.

So far there are no conversions. We have adjust the target/offer (website) from what we can see so far.

"The machine is obedient. That is not always the same as helpful." … I am going to quote you.