Google Ads Local Action Conversions

By: Davorin Cernoga, Last updated: Aug 28, 2023 | Published: Jul 08, 2019

Digital Marketing

What happens when you check your conversion action tab and see new ones that you haven’t set up yourself? You may think at first that someone has unauthorized access to your campaigns, but then, you see that source for these conversions is “Google hosted”.

You have just discovered Local Actions Conversions in your Google Ads account. Google system has set up these automated conversions. Let’s dig in and learn a little more about them, shall we?

Every advertiser wants to know how their ads are performing for their local stores on Google services like Google Maps. Now, with Local Conversion Actions we can track and analyze the behavior of such (local) users.

How to find Local Conversion Actions

First, an obvious way is checking your conversion action tab. If you see any conversion name that you do not recognize – check its source.

If you see that it is source is “Google hosted”, and that its action name starts with “Local actions” – everything is fine. Although, there is only one conversion action with a name not starting with “local action”, and that is “clicks to call”.

You can also look for a small “lock” icon beside the action names to be sure.

The second way to find those local actions is to go to any of your Google reports and add “all conversion” column.

After that, we need to segment our report by conversions -> conversion action.

Now we can see the results for every Google Ads campaign in our account regarding local action conversions

Even though in the example above there are only 3 of them, there is a total of 6 local actions. Each is accounted after a click on any Google location-based ad or service after an ad interaction:

Local actions – Website visits: click on the website link
Local actions – Directions: click on the “Get directions” button
Local actions – Other engagements: Clicks on other tracked user actions (for example: share location, save, etc.)
Clicks to call: click on the “Call” button
Local actions – Orders: (Vertical specific) click on the “Order” button
Local actions – Menu views: (Vertical specific) click on the menu link

How to see the results for local store

What’s great about these types of conversions is that they can show results for every advertiser’s store. But, to do that, an advertiser must have Google My Business profile set up (and insert all of his store locations).

To find these results first we must click on “locations” for a selected campaign, or for all campaigns.

After that, we need to choose “Per store report” which is found under “Geographic report”.

What we now see are the results for all stores that Advertiser has (or, at least, all the stores that are listed in their Google My Business account).

Very interesting information can be found here. If you want, you can add additional info about view-through conversions. This is great because we can now see how did users remember our ad message (view-through conversions are the conversions that happened after users have only seen an ad, not interacted with it).

Not everything is great. Arguably, there are some things that (maybe) can be done differently.

Possible problems with Local Action Conversions

These are automatically created conversions for which Google decided not to enable any changing of settings.

Settings for all of them are the same. They are counting “every conversion” for the last 30 days, with a view-through window of one week. But, most important thing is that they are NOT included in conversions and have a “last click” attribution model.

Because they are not included in “conversions” we can’t control bids for these conversions. Also, we must remember that automated bidding strategies (ECPC, CPA, ROAS) use only conversions/data from those conversions that are included in “conversion” column. There is also a “problem” in which we can’t include these conversions to Conversion Action Sets.

But, this is a problem only for advertisers who generally wans to have more control.

Next thing is not really a problem, but important information to keep in our minds. Local Actions Conversions are not available for every advertiser. Google has decided that for some “sensitive” categories there will be no such conversions. Those sensitive categories are related to health, religion, adult, and children content.

I guess that this is perfectly fine because local action conversions are using “local” information from users. Someone could argue that any information about any user that is searching for any health-related information on Google Maps is sensitive information. In a way, we could say that it would be unethical to additionally “track” data from those users.

Do not get me wrong. Every information about any user that gets under these “local conversions” data is anonymous. It’s just that Google’s decision to not include users in these sensitive categories is ethically and morally correct.

I know that some of you will be “sad” because you don’t have these conversions – but, this is a game that is set up by Google and we all must abide by it.