How-to · Updated October 9, 2026
See which conversion actions your Google Ads bidding is chasing
Updated October 9, 2026
15 minutes
Open Goals, Conversions, Summary and note which goals are account-default and which actions in them are Primary. Then read each campaign's Conversion goals setting. A campaign that bids for conversions chases the primary actions in its goals, plus every action in a custom goal. The rest is mostly for observation.
Before you start
- Your own definition of a lead, written down first: a call over a minimum length, a form submission, a booked appointment. You judge each action against that list, not against its name.
- Your call and form log for a recent week (optional), to compare against the Conversions column at the end.
Find the primary actions in your account-default goals
- In Google Ads, click the Goals icon, open the Conversions drop-down and click Summary.
- Click the Goals tab and scroll to All your goals. A goal labelled account-default goal is used by every campaign that has not been given its own goals. Hover over the campaign count beside a goal to see which campaigns use it.
- Click Edit goal on each goal and expand Conversion action optimization. The Action optimization column says Primary or Secondary (observe only) for every action in the goal.
- Write down each action that is Primary inside an account-default goal. Those are the actions bidding chases in every campaign that uses the defaults.
See which goals each campaign uses
A campaign can be set to its own goals. It then ignores which goals are account-default, so making a goal account-default, or taking that away, never reaches it. A change to Primary or Secondary inside a goal still applies everywhere that goal is used.
- Open Campaigns, select the Settings tab and choose a campaign.
- Expand Conversion goals. It says whether the campaign uses account-default goals or campaign-specific goals, and lists the goals it optimizes toward. Hover over a goal to see its Primary actions.
- To see every campaign at once, click the Columns icon, then Modify columns, and under Attributes add Conversion goals.
- Back on the conversions summary, expand Custom goals at the bottom of the Goals tab. Every action in a custom goal is used for bidding, even one set to Secondary, so note which campaigns use one.
Set Primary on leads only
This is a judgment, not Google's rule: for a business that sells by phone and form, an action belongs in Primary only if it is a lead you would pay for.
- Leave Primary on actions from your lead list: a call over your minimum length, a submitted form, a booking.
- Set anything that happens before a lead to Secondary (observe only): page views, button clicks, taps on a phone number when real calls are tracked too, and engagement events imported from Google Analytics.
- Where two actions record the same lead, such as Google's calls from ads and a call tracking company's import of the same calls, keep one of them Primary. Google's advice for imported calls is to include only one action per call in the Conversions column.
- Click Save on each goal you changed.
Google says Smart Bidding needs a 7 to 14 day learning phase and that frequent changes to conversion goals during it reset the learning window, so make all the changes in one sitting. If a campaign bids to a target cost per action, move the target gradually: taking cheap actions out of Conversions raises the reported cost per conversion, and Google advises adjusting targets over time as bidding adjusts.
Check it worked
On Campaigns, click Segment above the table, then under Conversions choose Conversion action. Under Conversions you should see only Primary actions from the goals each campaign uses, plus any action in its custom goal. Secondary actions still appear under All conv.
Compare a week of Conversions with the leads in your log for the same week. Google files a conversion under the date of the ad click and some arrive days later, so expect small gaps. A count well above your real leads means two actions are still counting the same lead.
Actions created from Google Analytics start as Secondary
Where the feature is available for your Analytics property, conversions created from Google Analytics events arrive in Google Ads as secondary by default, and can only be made primary in Google Ads. If a form event from Analytics is your only record of form leads, it is not steering bidding until someone changes it there.
The alert that says a goal is missing a primary action
Google says the alert "Your targeted goal is missing a primary conversion action" can appear even when the action that matters is set up correctly, and that it may refer to a minor action such as a page view. If your lead actions show under Conversions in the check above, Google says the alert may not significantly affect performance.