Glossary
What are campaign-specific conversion goals in Google Ads?
Melvin Salas1 min readVerified 2 October 2026
Short answer
Campaign-specific goals are a Google Ads setting that, in Google's words, allows you to 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. You can apply standard goals, a custom goal or a combination, and Google notes that you can only use one custom goal per campaign.
Google is cautious about them. It says that in general it's best to use your account-default goals across all your campaigns rather than creating campaign-specific goals, since this allows your campaigns to learn from one another, which can improve bidding. Where conversion actions deliver different values to your business, it suggests reporting on all of them at the account level and using Target ROAS or Maximise conversion value with different values assigned to each action, instead of the campaign level setting.
Google says Smart Bidding, including target CPA and Target ROAS, considers only conversions reported in the Conversions column when optimising towards your target, and that if you change conversion goals at the campaign level you should update your targets gradually over time as the bidding models adjust to newly reported conversions data, otherwise you may have unwanted fluctuations in spend. Its example switches a campaign from purchases to sign-ups and lowers the target CPA gradually rather than right away, to keep spend roughly stable. Shop visits are the exception: Google says Smart Bidding will react immediately to adding or removing the shop visits conversion goal, and that you should update your targets as soon as shop visits are added or removed from the Conversions column.
Google says you can see the goals for all of your campaigns by adding the Conversion goals column, under Attributes, to the Campaigns table. Our practice is to do that before comparing two campaigns' cost per conversion, because campaigns with different goals are not counting the same thing.
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Ask the Riibon app what your own account is counting as a conversion. It is free, with no time limit and no card. Or book a call and we run it for you.