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Primary conversion actions still contributing to optimization and should be removed
Posted by on October 22, 2025 at 7:47 amA senior level account manager at google told us that even if a primary conversion action is not included in the campaign, it can still count towards the optimization and machine learning. And that she recommended we turn into a secondary conversion just to avoid having the AI optimize for it.
This is the first time I've heard of such a thing. Wondering what you guys think?
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1 Reply
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even if a conversion isn’t tied to a campaign, Google can still use it to guide bidding because it’s marked as primary at the account level. The system looks at all primary actions for learning signals. If you don’t want it to optimize for that, just switch it to secondary and you’re good.
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As a strong user of campaign level goals, I’ve never witnessed behaviour that would indicate it does optimise to goals outside those set at the campaign level nor have I heard from a Googler that it does.
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Unless something has changed on Google’s end. The campaign would just optimize those the campaign specific conversion goal that you set for it. Google has a good support page on the topic: [https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9143218?hl=en-GB](https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9143218?hl=en-GB)
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They’re likely misinformed. If you set no campaign goal (default), your campaign uses all conversion data of all primary conversions, but when you set a goal (for example sign ups, or contacts, or a custom category) it only includes those in the underlying ML.
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Primary conversion actions are what Google optimizes for *unless* you have a campaign specific conversion goal. She is wrong about it being taken accounted for if it is not in the campaign specific goal.
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