Yes it double-counts, and sometimes that is fine. The real question is not how many primaries you have — it is what your bidding is actually optimising toward, and the primary flag is not a reliable answer to that.

On this page

• Do account-level primary flags tell me what the bidder uses?
• When is having several primary conversions fine?
• When does more than one primary conversion cause problems?
• What should I report regardless of what is biddable?

Do account-level primary flags tell me what the bidder uses?

A conversion action set to secondary still bids if it sits inside a custom goal. And a campaign-level custom goal overrides account-level primary flags entirely.

Real case: an account where every account-level flag said the valuable actions were secondary and some cheap proxy actions were primary. Two separate analyses — mine and an independent one — concluded the bidding was chasing junk. Both were wrong. A campaign-level custom goal was driving every campaign, and it contained the valuable actions. The account was fine.

Check the campaign's conversion goal configuration and the live conversions column. Never judge the bid signal from account-level primary flags.

When is having several primary conversions fine?

• They represent genuinely different outcomes you value — a purchase and a qualified enquiry — and the values reflect that difference.
• You are deliberately double-counting for a reason you can state, such as an added new-customer action running alongside the purchase action.

That second one is common and intentional. Just know it is happening: on one account it was 0.1% of counted value when introduced and 6.1% eighteen months later. Nobody broke anything, but any trend spanning that period is measuring two different things.

When does more than one primary conversion cause problems?

• Duplicate or legacy actions counting the same event twice.
• A test action still live in production.
• Upstream micro-events made primary on a count-based strategy, which points every incentive at cheap easy actions instead of revenue.

What should I report regardless of what is biddable?

Whatever is biddable, always report on the single action you are paid for, by conversion time. Reporting and bidding are different jobs. Making one action serve both is where most of this confusion starts.

Related questions

Should I switch my Google Ads conversion action from form fills to booked jobs?

Yes, and it is usually the single highest-value change available to a home-services account. Smart Bidding optimises toward whatever you feed it, so a form-fill goal buys you people who fill in forms. Read the full answer.

Why doesn't my Google Ads conversion count match the number of jobs in my CRM?

Expect a structural gap of roughly 30%, not zero. On a 14-location home-services network, the share of bookings matchable back to a click sat in a 0.56–0.83 band across settled windows — and a full forensic investigation found no ad-platform setting that explained the variance. Read the full answer.

Why is my exact match keyword showing for searches that have nothing to do with it?

Exact match has meant "close variant" for years, and close variants now include same- meaning rephrasings, implied words and reordered queries. What you are seeing is usually the system working as designed — the question is whether the variants are converting. Read the full answer.

Written by Usama Khan, who runs Google Ads for e-commerce brands and home-services companies at AdventurAds. Figures are from accounts under active management and are anonymised. Last reviewed 2026-08-26.