Is Google Ads bidding on the right conversion goal?

Google Ads can hold many conversion actions at once, purchases, checkouts started, phone calls, form fills, but Smart Bidding only optimises toward the ones flagged primary for its goal. A conversion action can report real numbers and still be the wrong one to bid on.

The failure mode this catches: a non-purchase action, most often "Initiate checkout" left over from an older tracking tool, marked primary while the real Purchase action sits secondary or missing entirely. Every dollar of Smart Bidding then chases people who start checkout, not people who finish it, and this can run for months with every dashboard still showing conversions and ROAS.

On Web tracking (/settings/tracking), the Google card lists every conversion action Google reports for the connected account, marked primary or secondary, alongside whether it looks like a real purchase action.

When a non-purchase action is primary while a purchase action exists as secondary or is missing, a warning explains exactly what is misconfigured and which action should be primary instead.