How to see conversions by individual action in Google Ads (and why the cost column goes blank)

In Google Ads, conversion actions are grouped together into conversion goals. The Conversions column shows the conversions you've received across your primary conversion actions, and Google's Cost/conv. is your total cost divided by the number in that column, over eligible interactions only.

So when more than one action is counted in a campaign's Conversions column, say a sale and a sign-up, its conversion count is the two added together, and its cost per conversion is spend divided by that sum. That is arithmetic, not anything Google says about your account, and it means the headline figure cannot tell you what a sale cost.

Google lists Conversion action among its conversion segments, described as the name of the conversion tracking action that you set up. To use it, Google says to click the segment icon in a table and select the data that you want to isolate.

Google's All conversions page suggests segmenting that column 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. That is the view we use, because it shows secondary actions beside primary ones.

Google's segmenting page says it plainly: conversion-based segments like Conversion action and Conversion lag work only with conversion-related columns like Conversions, All conv. and Conversion value. Clicks, Impr. and Cost show a blank value, '--', when a conversion-based segment is applied, and so do columns that incorporate cost, such as Cost/Conv.

Google does not say why. Our reading is that spend is recorded against clicks, and a click is bought before anyone knows which action, if any, it will lead to, so there is no cost figure that belongs to one action. That is our explanation, not Google's.

This is our method. Pull two reports over the same campaigns and the same window. The first has cost and no conversion segment. The second has conversions segmented by conversion action. If you use All conv. for it, set view-through conversions aside: Google says they are not included in the Conversions column, only in the View-through conversions and All conversions columns, and for display campaigns it describes them as conversions when a customer views an ad but doesn't click it. Join them on campaign and period, and divide each campaign's cost by each action's conversions.

Keep both reports on the same dates. Google says its standard conversion columns, as opposed to the (by conv. time) ones, are calculated based on the time of the click, not the time of the conversion, and that this lets you accurately measure cost per conversion because ad spend is also calculated based on the time of the click. The (by conv. time) columns report conversions by when they occurred instead, so we never divide cost by those.

Read the result for what it is. A campaign's cost divided by one action's count is what that action cost if it were the only thing the spend bought. It is not a share of the spend that belongs to the action, because, as the blank column says, there is no such share to report. It also divides all of the cost, where Google's Cost/conv. removes clicks that can't be tracked for conversions, so the two may not match exactly.

This is our own observation, not Google's, and it rests on too few accounts to carry a number. Where a campaign's goal held several actions, joining the two reports was the only way we found to see what each action really cost, and it changed our read on which goal was working.

It is now the first thing we do before judging a goal change. If a campaign bids for more than one action, its cost per conversion is a blend, and we take the blend apart before anyone acts on it.