How to Change the Campaign Goal in Google Ads?

What “Campaign Goal” Means (and Why It Matters Before You Change Anything)

1) Marketing objective (Sales, Leads, Website traffic, etc.)

When you create a campaign, you’re typically asked to pick an objective like Sales, Leads, Website traffic, or Awareness and consideration. Think of this as “setup guidance” that surfaces recommended features and settings during build-out. The catch is that for several modern campaign types, you can’t edit the marketing objective after the campaign is created (notably Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Video). So if your definition of “campaign goal” is the objective you selected in the campaign creation flow, you may be looking at a rebuild rather than a simple edit.

2) Conversion goals (what bidding and reporting actually optimize around)

In day-to-day account management, when advertisers say “change the campaign goal,” they usually mean “change what the campaign is optimizing for.” In most conversion-based strategies, that’s controlled by your conversion goals (groups of conversion actions, like Purchase, Contact, Submit lead form) and whether those actions are treated as primary (used for bidding and shown in the Conversions column) or secondary (observation-only, shown in the All conversions column).

This is the lever that most reliably changes performance direction without forcing a full rebuild: you’re telling automated bidding what a “win” is.

3) Account-default goals vs campaign-specific goals

You can run on account-default goals (recommended for most accounts because it supports cross-campaign learning) or override them with campaign-specific goals when a campaign truly needs a narrower definition of success. Be careful here: changing which goals a campaign optimizes toward can materially impact optimization and reporting, especially if you’re using Smart Bidding.

Step-by-Step: Change the Goal Your Campaign Optimizes For (Without Rebuilding)

Step 1: Confirm what the campaign is optimizing toward right now

Before you change anything, verify the campaign’s current goal configuration so you don’t “fix” the wrong layer.

1. Go to Campaigns.
2. Open the campaign.
3. Go to Settings.
4. Expand the section that shows conversion goals (often under a Goals area in campaign settings) and confirm whether you’re using account-default goals or campaign-specific goals.

If you’re troubleshooting at scale, it’s also useful to add a “Conversion goals” attribute column in your campaigns table so you can see which campaigns are overriding defaults.

Option A (Best for most accounts): Update your account-default goals

If your whole account should be steering toward a new outcome (for example, you want to stop optimizing for low-intent actions and focus on true leads or purchases), updating account-default goals is usually the cleanest approach. Campaigns using account-default goals will automatically inherit the change.

1. Go to the Goals area, then open the Conversions section and enter the Summary view.
2. Find the conversion goal you want to change.
3. Select Edit goal.
4. Choose Use as an account goal if you want it included by default across campaigns (except campaigns using campaign-specific goals).
5. Inside that goal, set the relevant conversion actions to Primary (biddable) or Secondary (observation-only).
6. Save your changes.

Practical tip: If you track multiple steps in a funnel (for example, View content, Add to cart, Purchase), it’s usually smarter to make only the most meaningful step the primary biddable outcome for account-default goals—otherwise you risk teaching bidding to overvalue “easy” actions.

Option B: Switch a single campaign to campaign-specific goals

This is the right move when one campaign has a different job than the rest of the account. Common examples include a brand search campaign that should prioritize leads over purchases, or a specialized campaign that should only optimize toward a specific conversion type.

1. Go to Campaigns and open the campaign you want to change.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Open the Goals area.
4. Select Use campaign-specific goal settings.
5. Select the conversion goals you want this campaign to optimize and report against.
6. Save.

You can also bulk-edit multiple campaigns from the campaigns table by selecting them and using an edit action to update conversion goals. This is a huge time-saver when you’re restructuring at scale.

Option C: Change whether a conversion action is Primary vs Secondary

This is one of the most overlooked “goal changes” and one of the most powerful. If an action is marked as Primary and the campaign is optimizing toward the goal that contains it, it can drive bidding. If it’s Secondary, it won’t be used for bidding (and will live in All conversions reporting), unless it’s included in a custom goal being used by the campaign.

1. Go to Goals → Conversions → Summary.
2. Find the goal that contains the conversion action you want to adjust.
3. Select Edit settings for that goal.
4. In the conversion optimization section, set the action to Primary or Secondary.
5. Save.

Practical tip: If you’re planning to change Primary actions, treat it like changing the “north star” for bidding. Expect a learning period, and avoid making additional major edits (budgets, targets, targeting expansion) at the same time if you want clean performance read-through.

Option D: Move a conversion action into a different conversion goal category

Sometimes the “goal” problem isn’t campaign settings—it’s that a conversion action is miscategorized (for example, sitting in a generic bucket instead of being grouped into a semantically meaningful category like Purchase or Sign-up). Recategorizing can unlock better optimization behavior and cleaner reporting organization.

1. Go to Goals → Conversions → Summary.
2. Hover the conversion action you want to change.
3. Open the action menu and choose the option to change to another conversion goal.
4. Select the destination goal and review the expected impact on goal makeup, conversion volume/value, and affected campaigns.
5. Save.

When You Can’t “Change the Goal” (and What to Do Instead)

If you meant the marketing objective

If your intent is to change the objective you selected during campaign creation, be aware that certain campaign types do not allow objective edits after the campaign is created (including Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Video). In those situations, the practical path is to create a new campaign with the correct objective and migrate intentionally—while still using conversion goals to control what the campaign optimizes for.

A safe transition checklist (minimize performance whiplash)

• Define the new success event first: make sure the right conversion actions exist, are correctly categorized, and are set as Primary if they should drive bidding.
• Change one major lever at a time: if you’re changing conversion goals, avoid simultaneously making big budget changes and aggressive target changes on the same day.
• Watch the right columns: confirm whether you should be judging success in Conversions vs All conversions based on what’s set to Primary vs Secondary.
• Expect a learning period: Smart Bidding models need time to adjust when the definition of a conversion changes. If you use target-based bidding, adjust targets thoughtfully rather than forcing a drastic jump immediately.

One final “expert reality check”

In most accounts I audit, the fastest path to “changing the campaign goal” isn’t rebuilding campaigns—it’s cleaning up conversion actions, aligning account-default goals, and being deliberate about what’s Primary vs Secondary. Once those foundations are correct, changing campaign-level goal settings becomes a controlled steering wheel instead of a risky switch-flip.

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When you want to “change the campaign goal” in Google Ads, it helps to separate the campaign’s original marketing objective (often locked for campaign types like Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Video) from the conversion goals that Smart Bidding actually optimizes toward; in many cases, the practical move is adjusting conversion goals (account-default vs. campaign-specific) and deciding which conversion actions are Primary vs. Secondary, then making changes carefully to allow for a learning period. If you’d rather not manage all of this manually across multiple campaigns, Blobr connects to your Google Ads account and runs specialized AI agents that continuously spot optimization opportunities and translate best practices into concrete next steps—like improving keyword-to-landing-page alignment with the Keyword Landing Optimizer or refining landing page messaging with the Campaign Landing Page Optimizer—while keeping you in control of what gets applied.