149 conversion actions, 7 that mattered: cleaning up what Google Ads learns from
A coaching business I work with had 149 conversion actionsConversion action In Google Ads, a defined event you count as a conversion: a form submit, a purchase, a booked call. Primary conversion actions are the ones bidding optimizes toward; secondary ones are recorded but ignored by bidding. in its Google Ads account. Not 149 conversionsConversion The action you want someone to take after seeing an ad: a purchase, a form fill, a booked call. Each platform counts conversions by its own rules, which is why two dashboards rarely agree.. 149 separately defined things that Google Ads was allowed to count as a conversion, most of them marked primary, most of them imported automatically from the attributionAttribution The rules for deciding which ad, click or channel gets credit for a sale or lead. Every tool uses different rules, so the same sale can be credited to Google in one report and Meta in another. tool over two years of nobody looking.
Subscription creations. Mailbox fees. Line items from Stripe that had nothing to do with acquiring a customer. Every one of them was feeding the bidding algorithm, and the algorithm was doing exactly what it was told: finding the cheapest way to trigger any of the 149.
Primary vs secondary is the whole game
Google’s documentation is unusually clear on this. Primary conversion actions are “reported in the ‘Conversions’ column in your reports and used for bidding”. Secondary actions “are for observation only. They are used for reporting in the ‘All conversions’ column in your reports, but not for bidding” (Google Ads Help, primary and secondary conversion actions).
That means every action you leave as primary is a vote on what the account should chase. If a $0 mailbox-fee event and a $5,000 program purchase both count as one conversion, smart biddingSmart Bidding Google Ads' automated bidding. Instead of setting bids by hand, you pick a goal (a target cost per lead, a target return, or simply the most conversions) and Google sets the bid for every auction using your conversion data. will happily fill the account with mailbox fees.
What the cleanup looked like
- List everything. Export the conversion actions with their status, category, source and counts for the last 90 days. Sort by count. On this account, most of the 149 had fired a handful of times or never.
- Decide what a customer is. For this business it came down to two events: a booked sales call and a purchase, both sourced from the attribution tool so they matched revenue. Everything else was noise or a duplicate.
- Demote, don’t delete. Moving 149 actions to secondary keeps their history in the All conversions column and avoids breaking anything downstream. We did it through the API with a dry run first, then live. The account went from 149 primaries to 7: the two that matter plus five legacy server-side actions that needed a separate decision.
- Resolve duplicates deliberately. Three of those five were server-side versions of the same booked-call and purchase events the attribution tool was already sending. Two sources of truth for the same event means double counting. Pick one and demote the other.
- Wait before judging. Smart bidding relearns after a change like this. We gave it two weeks before reading any performance numbers, because the first fortnight after a signal change is noise.
Rules to keep it clean
- One primary action per real business outcome. Lead, call, purchase. If you have more than five primaries, something is being double counted.
- Give every primary a value, even an estimated one, so the bidding can tell a $97 product from a $5,000 program. Target ROASTarget CPA Smart Bidding strategies where you name the cost per conversion (Target CPA) or the return on spend (Target ROAS) you want, and Google bids up or down to hit it. is meaningless if everything is worth 1.
- Anything auto-imported from a CRMCRM Customer relationship management software, such as HubSpot or Salesforce, where leads, contacts and deals are recorded. Usually the only system that knows whether a lead was real., an attribution tool or a payment processor arrives as primary by default. Review the account every quarter for new arrivals.
- Keep secondaries. They are free diagnostics. The mailbox-fee event is useless for bidding but perfectly good for reporting.
- Send the qualifiedQualified lead A lead that meets your sales team's definition of real: right kind of company, a budget, a working phone number. Different from a form fill, which anyone (or any bot) can produce. stage back, not the form fill. If your sales team only counts a lead once it has a budget, import that stage as the primary action and demote the raw form submission.
The part most people skip
None of this is visible in the campaign view. The account looked fine from the outside: conversions were up, cost per conversion was down. It took opening the conversion settings to see that the thing being optimized was not the thing the business sold. That is why a measurement audit starts in the settings, not the dashboard.