Google Ads
Send LeadJourney offline conversions back to Google Ads as your own conversion actions, so Smart Bidding optimises toward real outcomes – qualified leads, booked calls and won deals – instead of raw form fills.
Google's Smart Bidding only optimises toward the conversions it can see. Out of the box that's usually a form submit – so Google happily finds you more people who fill in forms, even if those leads never qualify or buy. Training Google Ads means feeding the real outcomes from your CRM back to Google as offline conversions, so its bidding learns who your good leads actually are and goes looking for more of them.
LeadJourney handles the whole offline-conversion part for you: it matches each CRM event back to
the original ad click (gclid) and sends it to Google as its own conversion action – no
manual uploads, no spreadsheets.
Before you start
Two things need to be in place first:
- Google Ads is connected and the ad accounts that run your campaigns are linked – see Connect Google Ads.
- Your events exist in LeadJourney and are receiving data from your CRM – see Events & the Events Manager.
How it works
- You decide which events should be sent back to Google.
- As soon as the first matching conversion comes in, LeadJourney sends it to Google and creates a matching conversion action for you.
- You set that conversion action to Primary in Google Ads – only Primary actions are used for bidding.
- You point your campaigns at it by making sure it's part of the conversion goals of a conversion-based bidding strategy.
Step by step
Choose which events to send back to Google
Open the Events Manager in LeadJourney (Settings → Events). For every event you want Google to optimise toward, turn on Send back to Ads?.
Pick the events that represent real value – e.g. QualifiedLead, BookedCall or
WonClient – rather than every event you track. The whole point is to teach Google to find
quality, so send the milestone that best reflects a good outcome for your business.
Let the first conversion flow through
You don't need to do anything else here – once an event has Send back to Ads? enabled, LeadJourney sends each matching conversion to Google automatically and registers the conversion action behind the scenes.
In Google Ads, open Goals → Conversions → Summary. The conversion action LeadJourney created shows up there, with its source marked as an import / API upload – that's how you know the connection is live and data is arriving.
Nothing in Google until you've actually had a conversion? That's expected. LeadJourney only sends an event once a real, matched conversion comes in from your CRM. Send a test conversion if you want to confirm the pipe end to end.
Set the conversion action to Primary
This step is important and easy to miss. A new conversion action often lands as a Secondary action, which Google only observes – it won't bid on it.
In Google Ads, open Goals → Conversions, click the LeadJourney conversion action and set its goal to Primary. Only then does Smart Bidding actually optimise toward it.
Primary, not Secondary
Repeat this for each event you enabled in Step 1. A newly added conversion action will default to Secondary again, even if your earlier actions are already Primary.
Optimise toward the conversion with Smart Bidding
Now tell Google to actually use it. Run the campaign on a conversion-based bidding strategy (Maximise conversions or Target CPA) and make sure your LeadJourney conversion action is part of the campaign's conversion goals. From then on, Google optimises delivery toward people likely to trigger that outcome.
Roll it out gradually – don't flip everything on day 1
It's tempting to switch your whole account over to LeadJourney conversions immediately. Don't. Changing the conversion goal a campaign bids on restarts the learning period, and you want proof it works before you bet the whole account on it.
Recommended: experiment first
- Create a campaign experiment (or duplicate one campaign) and set the copy to optimise toward your LeadJourney conversion action, while the original keeps its current setup.
- Let both run as a clean A/B test until you have enough data to compare.
- Only if the results are positive, gradually roll the LeadJourney conversion out to the rest of your campaigns.
This way you validate the change with real numbers instead of switching blind.
Troubleshooting
Conversions not optimising in Google?
Work through the chain:
- Is Send back to Ads? enabled on the event in LeadJourney?
- Has at least one real conversion been received and matched in LeadJourney?
- Do you see the conversion action under Goals → Conversions in Google Ads?
- Is that conversion action set to Primary (not Secondary)?
- Is the campaign on a conversion-based bidding strategy with that action in its goals?
- Are your campaigns tagged so the click ID (
gclid) is captured? See Connect Google Ads.
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