New ways to manage and optimize conversions

November 1, 2021

Conversion measurement is the foundation for campaign optimization and can help you understand the value of your marketing. It can also help you deliver better performance by providing tools like Smart Bidding with higher-quality signals. To make it even easier for you to manage your conversions and drive performance, we’re rolling out several new features.

Drive performance with conversion goals

We’re introducing conversion goals, a new way to optimize towards your objectives at the account or campaign level. As you create new campaigns, you’ll be able to tell Google Ads which specific business goals your campaigns should optimize for. As part of this flow, we’ll also provide tips on how to improve your overall measurement setup.

For example, let’s say you’re an online clothing retailer. Going forward, you can set a purchase as your account default goal so that all of your campaigns can optimize for that outcome. Within this purchase goal, you’ll also be able to define which specific conversion actions, such as “completed sale”, should be used for bidding. These controls give you the flexibility to optimize for what you care about while unlocking new bidding opportunities. 

You’ll start to see your conversion actions grouped by these new conversion goals when you create new campaigns over the next few weeks. Your existing conversion, conversion optimization, and bidding settings will not be changed. This means that no action needs to be taken on your part.

Ensure your conversion tags are working properly

We’re also adding Tag Assistant support, a tool that will help you confirm that your conversion tags are working as intended. This will help you diagnose any issues with your conversion actions and if there is an error such as unverified conversion actions, inactive tags, or no recent conversions. You’ll be able to see, in real time, which conversion actions are properly being measured.

Screenshot of the tag assistant showing "Results of troubleshooting: This conversion action is sending data to Google Ads"

Understand changes in conversion value with explanations

When optimizing your campaigns, it’s important to understand why conversion value may fluctuate. However, it’s not always easy to understand these shifts—it could be due to changes in conversion value delay, a problem with your conversion tag, issues with transaction-specific conversion values, and more. To give more transparency into Smart Bidding and make it easier for you to understand these fluctuations, you can now see explanations for Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value in your campaigns page for Search campaigns. 

With explanations, you can view the reason for any change in conversion value in a single click. This makes it easy for you to spend more time focusing on optimization and less time investigating performance issues.

Screenshot of Google Ads UI showing a prompt that says "View Explanations for what might have caused this change."

To learn more about conversions, visit the Google Ads Help Center.

Posted by Srinivas Rajamani, Product Manager, Google Ads

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