Conversions vs All conversions in Google Ads, and how to rebuild a campaign's goal history

Google says the Conversions column shows the number of conversions that you've received across your primary conversion actions, and that if you're optimising your bids for conversions, the data in that column is used for your bidding strategies. The All conversions column, in Google's words, includes any conversion actions that you've chosen not to include in your main Conversions column.

Google also says Smart Bidding, including Target CPA and Target ROAS, considers only conversions reported in the Conversions column when optimising towards your target. And a campaign does not have to share the account's goals: Google's campaign-specific goals setting lets you override your account-default goals and specify which goals you'd like to track in your conversion reporting and use for bidding in a particular campaign.

Put those together and, on our reading, the two columns for one campaign answer different questions. Conversions is what that campaign counted. All conversions is everything it was measured against. The difference between them is the part it was not counting.

This is our method, not Google's. Take one campaign and segment it twice: by Month, which Google lists among its time segments, and by Conversion action, which it lists among its conversion segments. Show the Conversions and All conv. columns. Google itself suggests segmenting All conversions by conversion action to see how many conversions you have associated with each action regardless of whether that action was included in the main Conversions column. We simply put Conversions beside it.

Then read each row. An action with conversions in both columns that month was, as far as the columns show, one the campaign counted. An action with All conv. and nothing under Conversions was recorded and not counted. Line the months up and the history is in front of you: which actions the campaign counted, when one joined, and when one left.

Set view-through conversions aside first. Google says they are not included in the Conversions column, only in the View-through conversions and All conversions columns, so an action that earns them will show a gap between the two columns with no change of goal at all.

Do the same for calls from tablets and computers. Google says that if you use call assets or call-only ads with Google forwarding numbers, conversions generated by calls from mobile search ads are counted as standard conversions and included in the Conversions column, while calls placed after viewing ads on tablets and computers are included in the All conversions column. A call action of that kind can therefore show a gap in every month it runs, again with no change of goal.

With that done, the month where an action shows some Conversions but fewer than its All conv. is the interesting one. Our reading is that the action was counted for part of the month, which is how a switch in the middle of a month shows up. That is an inference from the arithmetic, not something Google states, and we check it against anything else that dates the change.

The reporting data covers every month the campaign ran, and, subject to the caveat under What it cannot tell you, below, it records what was counted rather than what anyone remembers changing. That matters because a campaign's goals can move without anyone opening the campaign. Google says that if you optimise a campaign towards a campaign-specific goal and remove all conversion actions from that goal, the system automatically reverts to using your account-default conversion goals for the campaign's bidding and reporting.

So the question we ask of an inherited account is not what the settings say today, but what the campaign was counting in the month we are about to judge. The two columns answer that directly.

It tells you what was counted, not why. An action missing from Conversions was not counted, but the columns do not say whether that was a goal choice, a campaign override or something in how the action was set up, so we read the goal settings before calling it a decision someone made.

It also assumes that a past month's Conversions figure still reflects what the campaign counted at the time. We have not found that stated in Google's documentation. Before trusting the method on an account, check it against one month whose goal settings you know for certain, and if the two disagree, believe the settings.

This is our own practice, drawn from too few accounts to carry a number. On a campaign we did not build, the goal history comes before any judgement of its cost per conversion. Google's own example of a campaign-level goal change is a switch from purchases to sign-ups, which it describes as a more frequent user action with a lower CPA. A cost per conversion that falls in the month a cheaper action starts being counted has changed its definition, not its result, and the month-by-action view is how we catch it before anyone acts on it.