Google Ad Lead Gen Campaigns: Which Conversions Should Be Primary or Secondary?

When setting up your Google Ad "Lead Gen" Campaign, you must first make a really important decision that can have a major impact on the results of the campaign; which conversions should we track as "Primary Conversions" and which conversions should we track as "Secondary Conversions" (if any)?

Before we cover what to track as a Primary or Secondary Conversion, I'll go over exactly what I track as a conversion for a typical lead gen campaign:

Form Submissions
Website Calls
Call Ad Extension Calls
Offline sales conversion

Some websites also will have things like email addresses, chat widgets and booking widgets. While you can technically set up conversion tracking for these, it's not possible to track offline sales conversions from leads that come through these channels. For this reason, I recommend not having them on the website. The one exception to this is if the booking widget is also taking payment from the user before they're allowed to schedule an appointment. I've seen a med spa do this before and it worked out really well for them. In this case, you can track these as online sales conversions so it works.

If your boss or client insists on having email addresses, chat widgets and a  booking widget then yes, you should still track these as Primary Conversions.

I'll track all of the conversions listed above as a Primary Conversion except for Call Ad Extension Calls. These I will track as a Secondary Conversion because they typically generate lower quality leads. A good percentage of calls coming from the Call Ad Extension are from people thinking they're calling a competitor, which typically doesn't lead to a new customer.

If the campaign is struggling to generate any of the above conversions, it may make sense to set up a micro conversion that triggers when the visitor has spent say 10-20 seconds on the landing page. These I would track as a Secondary Conversion however. This would at least allow you to weed out clicks that are really low quality which eventually should help to generate more Primary Conversions.

While you're waiting on the campaign to generate offline sales conversion data, you'd optimize your campaign to lower your cost per conversion or cost per acquisition (CPA). Once your campaigns start receiving offline sales conversion data that includes conversion values, you can then start to optimize the campaign to increase return on ad spend, whether that's using Target ROAS bid strategy or manual CPC.