When to Use Custom Conversions

When should you use custom conversions?

This is a common point of confusion among advertisers. Custom conversions don’t replace standard or custom events. They have a unique purpose.

The Purpose

The primary benefit of custom conversions is to segment your results. Here’s an example…

The Purchase standard event will fire every time there’s a purchase on your website. You may run a campaign that uses Purchase as the optimized event, and the Results column will reflect that. But, it won’t only reflect the purchase of the product you’re promoting. Custom conversions help you know which product they bought.

Create custom conversions for the purchase of specific products…

Custom Conversion

…and then add columns to your reporting for those custom conversions.

Custom Conversion

You can do this for other events, too, like Leads or Complete Registration.

Optimization

You should rarely optimize for custom conversions, but there are exceptions. The standard event will have far more data behind it to optimize.

Purchase Optimization

But if you sell different products that appeal to uniquely different groups, you might create a custom conversion to segment those purchases and use it as your optimization event.

Custom Conversion

I’d still try the standard event first, but it’s worth an experiment.

How do you use custom conversions?

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