Glossary
What is the difference between primary and secondary conversion actions?
Melvin Salas1 min readVerified 2 October 2026
Short answer
In Google Ads, conversion actions are grouped together into conversion goals, and most actions can be set as primary or secondary. Google says primary actions are reported in the Conversions column in your reports and used for bidding as long as the standard goal they are part of is used for bidding. Secondary actions are for observation only: they are used for reporting in the All conversions column, but not for bidding, even if the goal they are included in is used for bidding.
Google names one exception. It says that if a secondary action is part of a custom goal, it's used for bidding, and that conversion actions included in a custom goal are used for reporting and bidding regardless of whether they're set as primary or secondary. Separately, Google notes that primary conversion actions not used for optimisation may be used to enhance predictions.
The setting lives in the goal. Google's steps are to go to Summary in the Conversions drop-down of the Goals menu, find the goal that includes the conversion action, click Edit goal, choose Primary or Secondary (observe only) in the Conversion action optimisation section, and click Save. Conversions created from Google Analytics events are secondary by default, Google says, and can only be updated to primary in Google Ads, although it adds that this feature may not be available to every Google Analytics property.
What follows is our practice rather than Google's. The label on an action does not settle whether a campaign bid for it, because a custom goal can override it and a primary action only bids while its goal is used for bidding. So we read a campaign's goals first and an action's label second.
We check this on every account we run
Riibon ties Meta and Google Ads back to outcomes measured outside the platforms, payments and bookings, so the number a decision rests on is one the business would recognise. When the platform and the business disagree, we show both and say which one we trusted.
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.