Campaign-level conversion actions now live for Google search, display campaigns

While it might not have been the flashiest, the announcement from Google Marketing Live last month that I heard many marketers say they were most excited about was the ability to set conversion actions at the campaign level.

That’s now here. Google said Thursday that campaign-level conversion action settings are available for search and display campaigns. They’ll be supported for video campaigns later this year.

Why we should care. Until now, conversion action settings applied to an entire account. Sure, you could segment by conversion type at the campaign level, but all counted conversions were totaled up in the “Conversions” column. You could not choose which conversion actions to optimize against — whether manually or with Smart Bidding — at the campaign level. This forced many companies to set up separate accounts  in order to apply budgets and optimize campaigns to separate conversion goals.

You can now choose which conversion actions to include in the “Conversions” column at the campaign level. This will allow you to analyze performance and optimize campaigns based on the most relevant conversion action types.

The “All conversions” column will still show all the conversions actions you’ve selected for inclusion at the account level.

Conversion action sets. Often, you might have campaigns that you want to be able to optimize for more than one conversion action. The new conversion action sets feature will allow you to bucket conversion actions and apply them across campaigns for reporting in the Conversions column.

You’ll find a new Conversion Action Sets tab in the Conversions section located under Tools in your accounts.

If you’re using Smart Bidding in those campaigns, the strategies will optimize for the conversions in the entire set.

Additional details. Google says, “This feature should be used when your campaigns are aiming to capture different conversion types. If you have proper values setup for different conversion types that are valuable to your business across all campaigns in your account, you should simply use Target ROAS.”

This can also help solve the need to set up different accounts to manage separate marketing budgets. Google explains with this scenario: “For example, suppose you’re a hotel group with separate marketing budgets for the different chains of hotels, and different campaigns targeting online bookings for separate chains. Now you can simply choose the corresponding conversion action(s) for each chain and ensure their budgets are delivering the valuable actions they were intended to drive.”