Purchase Conversions Disabled While Others Enabled
A purchase or sale action on this account is set to Disabled while other actions (signups, page views, add-to-carts) are still enabled. Smart Bidding has no purchase signal to optimize toward, so it picks whichever enabled action has the most volume. That is almost never the right target. For an e-commerce account, this is the most direct way to spend budget on the wrong goal.
Why It Matters
Google Ads optimizes campaigns toward enabled Primary actions in the relevant conversion goal. When the purchase action is disabled and the only enabled Primary is something like "Add to Cart" or "Newsletter Signup," the campaign cheerfully drives add-to-carts. Many of those carts will never check out. Spend climbs, micro-volume climbs, real revenue declines, and the reporting surface does not flag the problem because the campaign is doing exactly what it was configured to do. The usual cause is one of two patterns. A team experimented with disabling Purchase during a tracking-fix window and forgot to re-enable it. Or someone disabled a duplicate Purchase action without realizing it was the Primary one feeding bidding, leaving only the secondary or alternate Purchase action behind (which may itself be misconfigured or disabled). The critical severity is appropriate because the misalignment between business intent (drive purchases) and configured signal (drive whatever else is enabled) is total. No fancier analysis is needed to spot the gap. It is one toggle in Google Ads.
How To Fix It
- Open the AdLint details and confirm which purchase or sale actions are currently disabled.
- In Google Ads, open Tools and Settings > Measurement > Conversions, find each disabled purchase action, and decide whether it should be re-enabled.
- If the action is genuinely obsolete (replaced by a newer Purchase action), confirm the replacement is enabled and Primary in the relevant conversion goal. Then archive the obsolete action.
- If the action is the canonical Purchase, re-enable it and make sure it is Primary. Confirm any campaign-level goal overrides inherit the change.
- Annotate the change date. Smart Bidding will re-enter a 7- to 14-day learning period as it adjusts to the restored macro signal.
Example
Action: "Purchase"
Status: Disabled
Other enabled actions: "Add to Cart" (Primary), "Newsletter Signup" (Primary)
Result: Smart Bidding optimizes for add-to-cart volume.This Google Ads account has purchase or sale conversion actions set to Disabled while other conversion actions remain enabled. Per Google's conversion-tracking and conversion-goal documentation, Smart Bidding optimizes toward enabled Primary actions; when the macro business outcome is disabled, the optimizer falls back to whichever enabled Primary has the most volume, typically a micro-conversion that does not correlate with revenue. The result is spend driving lightweight events while real purchase volume declines, with no warning surfaced in standard reporting. Fix: confirm which purchase action is canonical, re-enable it, set it Primary in the relevant conversion goal, archive any obsolete duplicates, and allow a 7- to 14-day learning period for Smart Bidding to adjust. Source: support.google.com/google-ads/answer/1722022.
Drop this paragraph into your client deliverable. Sources back to the canonical platform documentation linked below.
References
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