Anyone who’s run Google Ads for more than five minutes knows that digital advertising is anything but static.
The urge to keep things simple – one set of goals for the whole account, nice and tidy – makes sense.
But if you’re still relying on account-default conversion goals, you’re likely leaving performance (and money) on the table.
The real magic? It happens when you start thinking about what each campaign actually needs to achieve.
Let’s break down why campaign-specific goals aren’t just a “nice-to-have” – they’re the backbone of truly effective Google Ads management.
The basics: How Google Ads handles goals
Google Ads lets you define what success looks like.
Is it a purchase?
A demo request?
An appointment request?
These conversions are the currency of your campaigns. There are two main ways to tell Google what counts as a win.
Account-default conversion goals
Set a goal at the account level, and every campaign inherits it.
It’s neat, it’s consistent, and your reports line up across the board.
If you want to see all your campaigns chasing the same outcome, this will do the trick.
But here’s the snag: not every campaign wants the same thing.
Campaign-specific goals
Here’s a different approach.
You can override the account default and tell Google what goals you actually care about for each campaign.
Maybe your ecommerce campaign is all about purchases, but your brand awareness campaign is only interested in newsletter signups.
Custom goals mean every campaign gets to chase its own finish line.
Why goals aren’t just for reporting
It’s tempting to think of goals as just a reporting tool – a way to see what’s working.
But in Google Ads, goals steer your campaign in whatever direction you desire.
They explain how automated bidding works and how machine learning optimizes your spend.
Smart Bidding runs on the right data
Google’s Smart Bidding (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions) is all about using real-time data to get you more of the conversions you care about.
But here’s what most miss:
Each campaign’s bidding algorithm learns from the conversion data you feed it.
If a campaign is set to “account default” and that default is “Purchases,” even your lead gen campaign is going to start chasing buyers instead of leads.
Switch to campaign-specific goals, and Smart Bidding finally focuses on what matters for each campaign – whether that’s sales or leads.
Reporting that actually means something
When every campaign is scored by the same metric, you lose clarity.
A lead gen campaign shouldn’t be judged on purchases, and a sales campaign shouldn’t care about form fills.
Granular, campaign-level goals let you see which campaigns are winning at their own game, not someone else’s.
Dig deeper: Setting PPC goals: How to tailor KPIs and metrics for each funnel stage
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The problem with one-size-fits-all goals
Here’s what goes wrong when you set just one goal for the whole account:
Misaligned optimization: Your lead gen campaign gets optimized for sales, so you miss out on valuable leads.
Misleading results: You can’t compare campaigns fairly if they’re chasing different results but measured by the same yardstick.
Dumbed-down algorithms: Smart Bidding can’t learn fast enough when it’s fed mixed signals from campaigns with clashing objectives.
Imagine you run two campaigns:
Campaign A: Product sales – Its job is to drive purchases.
Campaign B: Lead gen – Its job is to collect contact form submissions.
If both campaigns are set to Purchases as their goal, Campaign B’s real success – the leads – won’t even show up.
Worse, Google’s algorithms will start hunting for buyers in a campaign that’s supposed to find leads.
But if you set Purchases as the goal for Campaign A and Contact Form Submission for Campaign B, two things happen:
Each campaign is optimized for its true purpose: Smart Bidding gets smarter, faster.
Your reports tell the real story: No more squinting at conversion numbers that don’t quite add up.
Here’s an example of a multi-family real estate campaign.
As an inherited campaign, this account presented many challenges. The largest offender was highly inflated leads.
Counting account-specific leads in March, the campaign drove 116.66 conversions:
While this looks promising, every single lead was unqualified and didn’t convert into new move-ins.
After some considerable clean-up, new campaigns ramped up in April.
The core focus was to accurately track conversions by changing the focus to campaign-specific leads.
As a result, the campaign delivered six qualified conversions, driving an 18% ROI:
This gap shows why it’s so important to set up conversion tracking correctly in Google Ads.
Without it, you can’t accurately measure how each campaign is performing or optimize your bidding strategies effectively.
It gets even trickier if you’re using the Maximize conversions strategy with inflated data.
In that case, Google ends up optimizing for a broader range of actions – not just the ones your campaign is actually responsible for, which can lead to wasted spend.
Also, remember: when you count all conversions across your entire account, the numbers for any one campaign can get inflated – especially if other campaigns are contributing to those conversions on your site.
Are Drafts and Experiments affected?
If you’re running experiments (and you should be), pay attention to how conversion goals affect your tests.
The original campaign has all the historical data for its conversion goals, while the experimental version with new goals starts from scratch.
That means your experiment might look skewed at first.
Don’t write off a new goal too soon; it just hasn’t had time to catch up.
Get Google Ads to work for you – not in spite of you
Account-default goals are easy, but easy rarely wins in advertising.
If you want sharper optimization, clearer reporting, and smarter algorithms, you need to set goals where they matter – at the campaign level.
Stop settling for “good enough,” and start unlocking the real performance your campaigns are capable of.
This is how you truly get Google Ads to work for you.
Leverage its sophisticated capabilities to align perfectly with your business ambitions, instead of just working around a generic setup.
It’s time to move beyond the complacency of “good enough” and actively unlock the real, transformative performance your individual campaigns are capable of delivering.
Dig deeper: How to use the new customer acquisition goal in Google Ads