Primary vs Secondary Conversions in Google Ads: How to Choose?

Hey, this is Austin from Grow my Ads and in today's video I actually have a response to Suru Practice who a few weeks ago asked a question. I have two conversions I'm interested in begin checkout and purchase. More interested in the purchase of course. Should I have both conversions set up at the account level, primary and secondary or both primary? So I'm going to explain the difference between primary and secondary conversions and how you should be setting those up in your account for the long term success. So let's dive in. Let's start with the Google support page real quick on primary and secondary conversion actions. So primary actions, these are conversion actions that are reported in the conversion column and this is used for bidding. As long as the standard gold they are part of use for bidding Secondary actions, these conversion actions are for observation only. They're used for reporting in the all conversion columns in your reports but not for bidding. That's the most important part here is the bidding aspect of it. So I'm going to hop into an account that actually had this set up incorrectly and explain what they should have done and this should hopefully help bring some clarity. Anyone who's trying to figure out what conversions should I set to primary? Which ones should I set to secondary? So let me pull up that account when I have a lot of this blurred. The campaign naming structure here would give some some things away too. So I have to be careful on that. But let's go into their conversions. So I've got several months pulled back. They have a purchase conversion and there's a lot of cleanup that needs to be done in this account. This was a recent audit of ours that we did. So they have this purchase conversion that is the macro conversion. They do sell a product on their website that is exactly what you want to be going after if you're E Commerce. So for E Commerce I always recommend your purchase being set to primary. That's what you're looking to do is is make money right from from those buyers. So we want our bidding, especially when you're using smart bidding to be learning off of that purchase data that you get. And the more data you give it, the better your smart bidding is going to act as well. Calls are another good one if they matter to you. So in some campaigns I will have purchase at the primary. I will have calls set to primary, especially if I'm using any form of call tracking like call rail. If calls are not as important then I would set calls to secondary begin checkout. So if we take a look at this account, they have begin checkout set to primary. This is a huge mistake and I'm going to show you why. But I've seen this happen in many accounts and in fact that was one of the questions that we just talked about on the YouTube comments by Subaru. Practice is that I have a begin checkout. Should I add that as primary as well? It seems like it would make sense, right? Like, hey, the more people I get to begin checkout, the more purchases I'll end up making. But that's not totally correct. What ends up happening is you're going to get the machine learning to start going after the lowest hanging fruit. So you have to remember Google's smart bidding, their algorithm, it doesn't know anything, you're just giving it data. So begin checkout means nothing to it. And purchase really doesn't mean anything to it as well. It just knows, hey, there's begin checkout as a conversion and there's also a purchase. But begin checkout is actually way easier for us to go get. So. And I call it the machine learning us, whatever it is, right? Some voodoo magic. But the machine learning then, or the algorithm is going after the lowest hanging fruit, it always does. Whatever the least resistance it can get, it goes after. So in most cases what happens is you fill up your conversion data with a bunch of begin checkouts, but it's really not the ideal customer you're looking for. When if you give the machine learning nothing more than purchase data, it's going to continue to learn from that purchase data and it's going to get better at finding people who look more like the people who are purchasing from your website. You don't want just a bunch of begin checkouts, you want a bunch of purchases. Now begin checkout is good to have in secondary because now it's just an observation so you at least you get some data there. All right, how many checkouts are we getting? So what's our conversion rate from the checkout to the purchase? Maybe we have a conversion rate optimization issue that we should be working on within our process. But the machine learning, we don't want to give this data to the machine learning. This is just for your own analysis and insight to better your website and checkout process. All you need is the purchase data or calls, if that makes sense. So in this case, they do have some calls in here. That's fine. Now let me go into the actual campaigns and I'm going to share with you. First off, some of their bid strategies aren't the greatest, but they do have three of them on max conversions. So if we go into the conversion actions, things look great right before I Split this out. Wow. 35 conversion rate. 62% conversion rate. No one's getting a 62% conversion rate. Here we are. So we have. They also have button clicks. I didn't even show that. So they have button clicks, begin checkout purchase. And then I actually have to. I'm gonna blur this one out. This is a micro conversion too, but it, it gives too much information away. So I'm gonna blur it out. We don't need to worry about that. But button click, begin checkout. These two, the look, the machine learning is, is going bananas on, on those. So it's making up a giant portion of their conversions in these campaigns. Well, how are you supposed to bid then and optimize around purchases when 90% of the volume is coming from begin checkouts and button clicks? Well, you can't. So it doesn't make any sense to be running those as your main primary conversions. If I just had purchases in here, I can now start dialing in my return on ad spend. This is an E Commerce client, so that's what they're going after. And if we look, hey, your conversion rate said you had 62%, but in reality you only had 37 purchases out of 4,000 clicks. There's an issue and, well, it is performance max campaign here. You only did 11,000 in revenue from that purchase tag here and you spent $5,400. So your return's not good. It's not profitable for them in this case. So how do we fix this? Well, in their case, I said, unfortunately, we're going to have to start taking some of these secondary conversions out of here. We have to go to just a purchase. It's going to be a sucky 30 days because it's going to whack out the smart bidding because the smart bidding is so used to begin checkout and button click. And I'm going to take that away. And now it only has purchases. So this, this will get finicky and it could put these campaigns into a bit of a lull period. It has to relearn now. It's going to go in this relearn phase. Well, over time, what we're going to be able to do though is we're going to still get some purchases coming in. Now I'm going to be able to optimize our campaign and I'm going to be able to optimize our bidding eventually to start increasing their return on ad spend. But I can't do that until I get rid of these incorrect micro conversions being set up as primary conversions in the account. So there's a real life example. So for your account, how you should be looking at it is what's the macro conversion I want for E Commerce? Usually that's purchase phone calls are fine too. For lead generation, that's going to be a form fill of some sort, right? So now you may still want to track people who are taking certain actions on your website, but you put those into secondary. You do not add those as a primary conversion because we only want the smart bidding and machine learning going after and learning from people who are actually completing the forms for lead gen. Hopefully that brings some clarity. Any questions, put them in the comment sections and I will gladly respond. Thanks.