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Help me Understand: Primary vs Secondary Conversions, Account-Default Conversion Goals vs. Not
My Ecommerce brand has conversions for Google focusing on add to carts (ATC) and purchases. These are pulled in from our Google Ads Tag, and from our GA4 account. We pull the GA4 version of each event as a way to just see how the numbers differ:
* ATC
* ATC – Google Ads Tag (set as a secondary goal)
* ATC – GA4 (set as a secondary goal)
* Purchases
* Purchase – Google Ads Tag (set as a primary goal)
* Purchase – GA4 (set as a secondary goal)So in Google Ads, you can set conversions as primary or secondary action. In addition, you can set the conversions as account-default goals or not.
While I like to think that I understand these 2 sets of concepts individually after a few years of doing this, maybe my brain is overthinking things this late in the afternoon. With that being said, I am trying to understand how they work together and/or can be layered on each other. If someone could help me, that would be amazing!
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||IS Account-Default Goal|IS NOT Account Default Goal|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Primary Action|All campaigns in the account will use and bid toward to the primary action by default unless changed in the campaign settings.|All campaigns will not bid to the primary action as the account’s default goal, and the goal will have to be manually selected in each campaign’s settings.|
|Secondary Action|**??? – I assume it still doesn’t do anything more than be something you can view in “all conversions”?**|Secondary action is neither counted in conversions (but it is counted in “all conversions”) and is not a campaign’s default goal.|​
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1 Reply
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Your understanding of both concepts is correct.
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Yes, I agree with this description. Secondary conversions are useful for understanding:
a) the total value your campaign is delivering, in cases where you may include something like newsletter sign-ups
b) how different tracking methods compare, in cases like above where you’ve counting purchases with both GA4 and the Google Ads Tag.
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