Primary Gap
Your Google Ads account has conversion actions where "All conversions" runs more than twice the size of "Conversions." That gap is the volume marked Secondary. It counts in reports. It does not feed Smart Bidding. So a big chunk of what looks like account-wide performance is invisible to the bidder making your spend decisions.
Why It Matters
The "Conversions" column is the one Smart Bidding optimizes against. Only actions flagged as Primary land in it. "All conversions" is the catch-all, including every Secondary action plus imports, cross-account, and cross-device variants. When the gap goes above 2x, you have a meaningful amount of conversion volume that the bidder is ignoring on purpose. Sometimes that is correct. Newsletter signups, scroll events, and PDF downloads belong in Secondary. They are diagnostic, not commercial. But the same gap appears when somebody demoted a real revenue action during a cleanup pass, or when a new action was added and never promoted, or when an import is feeding Secondary while the tag-based version was disabled. From the outside the numbers look fine. Reporting shows healthy growth in "All conversions." Internally, the bidder is steering off a smaller, possibly stale signal. The other symptom: Smart Bidding learning loops keep restarting because the Primary action does not have enough volume to escape learning, while the Secondary action has plenty. The fix is one toggle. The cost of leaving it alone is months of underperforming campaigns.
How To Fix It
- Open Google Ads, Goals, Conversions, Summary. Sort by the gap between "All conv." and "Conversions."
- For each flagged action, decide: should this feed bidding (Primary) or is it diagnostic (Secondary)?
- Promote real revenue or qualified-lead actions to Primary at the appropriate goal level.
- Leave page views, scrolls, and minor engagement as Secondary.
- Recheck the report after 7-14 days and confirm the gap closed on the actions you promoted.
Example
Lead Form: Conversions = 42, All conversions = 128, ratio 3.0x
Most of the volume is sitting in Secondary and not feeding the bidder.This Google Ads account has one or more conversion actions where the "All conversions" column exceeds the "Conversions" column by more than 2x. Per Google Ads conversion goals documentation, only Primary actions feed the "Conversions" column that Smart Bidding optimizes against. Volume marked Secondary is reported but excluded from bidding decisions. A gap this large usually means a real revenue action was left as Secondary after a goals reorganization, a newly added action was never promoted, or an offline import is duplicating a tag-based action that has since been demoted. The visible effect is healthy "All conversions" growth alongside underperforming campaigns and Smart Bidding learning loops that fail to settle. Fix: review the flagged actions, promote genuine revenue or qualified-lead actions to Primary at the correct goal level, and leave diagnostic events as Secondary. Source: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/12727548.
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References
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