Campaign-level conversions & conversion action sets

Today, the good news is yes. Campaign-level conversion settings are now available in search and display as Google announced at Google Marketing Live. This is a great feature when working on multiple campaigns with different conversions. And this means Smart Bidding can now optimise towards the right conversion action or even a Conversion Action Set for each campaign. Well done, Google!

Before June, all conversions were set at account level as default and applied to all campaigns. But surely, different campaigns don’t always serve the same goals i.e. downloads, sign-ups, purchases etc.

Now you can simply choose at campaign level settings, which conversion action to optimise that campaign towards when using Smart Bidding target CPA or Target ROAS.

This will override the account level conversion setting for the selected campaigns. Other conversions can still be seen in “All conversions” column and a breakdown of the individual conversion performance within the action set for each campaign can be seen when breaking down by Segment > Conversion type.

The conversion action sets can also be created in advance from the conversion section within the tools menu so they can be easily applied at the campaign level later.

with separate marketing budgets targeted at different actions in the same conversion scope either in the same account with or part of the same manager account when using cross-account conversion tracking   –  [Google, 2019]

As Google says, this allows campaign managers to feed smart bidding strategies with the correct conversion data, whenever a multi touch point strategy is being used. So a display campaign optimising towards a report download, won’t be affected by the main account level conversion event ‘purchases’. Smart bidding just got smarter.

Want to optimise towards more than one conversion at campaign level? Use Conversion action sets.

Conversion action sets allow you to group conversions with similar intent together i.e. soft leads. This will also help Smart Bidding to learn from a larger set of conversion actions.

To create conversion action sets, the account needs at least 2 conversion actions. The conversion action sets tab will automatically appear once the account meets the above requirement.

Smart bidding optimises towards whatever is in the “Conversions” column. After deciding which conversions or conversion action sets to be counted in the “Conversions” column at campaign level, should you update the tCPA or tROAS immediately with the new target or gradually adjust over time?

As smart bidding takes time to adjust to changes, sudden big changes might cause high fluctuations in spend. So it is advisable to update your targets gradually rather than by a significant amount.

Besides, Google recommends to use the same set of conversion actions across multiple campaigns or use ‘Include in’ Conversions setting when possible. This makes sense since the larger set of conversion data, the better for learnings.

To sum up, campaign-level conversions, conversion action sets and Smart Bidding are winning solutions for accounts with multiple conversion actions. These features not only save you time, make conversions more organised and more granularly controlled, but also increase the flexibility of Smart Bidding and help manage your bids more effectively!