to use conversion value rules in Google Ads


Advertisers can benefit from adding values to their conversions. For ecommerce, conversion value rules are common as they optimize for ROAS. This strategy is also useful for lead generation campaigns, and it’s because of the same reasons. The setup may be more difficult, but it can have huge benefits.


In ecommerce, revenue is tracked directly on the website based on the amount of the cart purchased. This means that the revenue should reflect the value of every sale.


How can we adjust values for lead generation where the value of a lead to your business starts out as a guess?


Enter: conversion value rules.


This article will explain how to use conversion values rules in order to get the best results.

Table of Contents


What are the rules for conversion values?

You can use conversion value rules to increase the value of your Google Ads account for a specific conversion. These will be covered in a minute.


Each conversion can be assigned a dynamic value depending on the attributes that matter more (or lesser) to your business.

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For which customer attributes are conversion values adjusted?

You can adjust conversion values based on audience segment, device, and geography. You can adjust conversion values for specific actions, such as store visits and store sales. However, these are less valuable than the other options.


Each conversion rule can also have a second condition. You can then combine attributes from different categories to get a more accurate tracking. You can, for example, create a rule if you are aware that your net new desktop customers have a greater lifetime value than returning customers or new mobile customers.


What Google Ads campaigns qualify for the conversion value rule?


Google describes the effectiveness of conversion values rules as follows:




The wording is suspicious. I don’t say that anything will definitely change. Today, no tin-foil hat theories. Just…calling the curious. For now, the conversion value rules are applicable to all four types of campaigns.

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Setting up conversion values rules in Google Ads


Let’s look at some examples of how the conversion value rules are used.

Click on Create conversion value rule under the Value Rules section of the Goals menu to find the Google Ads conversion value rules manager.


Rules for converting value based on the audience

Let’s first create a rule for a conversion value based on Google Ads segment.


You can search for an audience by name or browse the categories.

As can be seen, you can create conversion value rules for audiences using detailed demographics, affinity groups, in-market and life events, as well as segments of your own data, such as remarketing, and customer uploads.

Each time you add a new audience segment, the list will update in the upper-right corner of the screen. Each logic statement has been bolded in or. This means that the user could be in either of these audience segments to be eligible for value adjustments. AND are not allowed in rules, as they require that the user be included in all groups. You would have to create more complex segments within the Google Ads audience manager.


After you have selected all audience segments that are applicable, you can choose the secondary condition. This must be based on either device or geography. As mentioned above, you won’t be allowed to combine Audience Segments.


Conversion values based on device


This is shown as a secondary condition in the example, but the options are the same if device is the primary condition.


You can either choose to increase the conversion value on all devices (which I find counterintuitive) or you can pick which devices you would like to enhance. This only includes desktop, mobile and tablet without any other narrowing features.


Conversion rules for based on geographic location


The geography setting is the same for devices and secondary conditions, although I am showing it as the primary condition.


Radius targeting is not available with location adjustments. You can also add exclusions or targeting at the country, city, DMA or zip code levels.


You can also control the advanced location settings. This includes the actual location of the user or the locations that they are interested in.


Add the value adjustment for selected conditions


The options for value adjustments remain the same, regardless of whether or not you use a secondary group.


Then you can choose whether to add or multiply the value.


These two functions are self-explanatory. The add function allows you to increase conversion values by a specific amount, while multiply gives the option to scale the value at a dynamic rate.

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Limitations on conversion values


The rules for calculating conversion values can be a very helpful tool to track the value that your business receives from conversions. However, there are limitations.


Only one conversion rule can be used for each conversion. You’ll have to choose the option that has the most impact or accuracy, since there is only one choice.


You will need to create a new value rule if you want to modify the existing conversion value rules for an action. The previous data on conversion values will remain but the new enhancement will be applied for all future conversions.


Second, the conversion rules only allow for a very limited amount of control to decrease the value. You can see that if you add a negative value in the multiply or add field, an error is displayed.


In the image above, you can only adjust a value of conversion down. You add multipliers less than 1, which means you could reduce a value of conversion by 50% or even half. Any adjustment between 0.50 and 0.99 can be adjusted in this way.


This tactic seems to be more for incremental adjustments upwards, rather than down. You may want to use value rules instead of devaluing the other group if you discover that many converters are worth much less than the current value.


How do you know if your conversion value rules are the right ones for your business

The conversion value rules allow you to better track your Google Ads ROI by increasing incrementally the conversion value associated with each campaign based on certain conditions. They can be changed at any time and adjusted according to your preferences. These rules are meant to take advantage of both your customer knowledge and Google’s machine-learning to get the most out of your account.


You can use audience, device, and geographic categories to reflect your campaign’s success if you are unable to track dynamic values.

The original post Conversion Value Rules for Google Ads first appeared on WordStream.

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