Most Google Ads accounts treat every conversion as if it’s worth exactly the same. A lead from a Fortune 500 company gets the same bid as a lead from a one-person startup. A sale in San Francisco gets the same Smart Bidding weight as a sale in a market where your margins are 30% lower. A conversion from someone already in your CRM gets bid on identically to a cold prospect.
That’s not a minor inefficiency. It’s handing your bidding algorithm incomplete information and then wondering why it makes bad decisions. Google Ads conversion value rules fix this — and the vast majority of accounts with Smart Bidding enabled have never configured them.
- Conversion value rules let you multiply or adjust the reported value of a conversion based on audience, location, or device — without changing your actual conversion action setup.
- Smart Bidding uses reported conversion values to set bids. If your values are flat and unrealistic, your bids are flat and unrealistic.
- Location value adjustments are the most underused lever for multi-market advertisers — and can dramatically improve tROAS efficiency across regions.
- Audience value rules work best when you have real data on lifetime value differences between customer segments, not gut feelings.
- Value rules don’t replace good conversion tracking setup — they enhance it. If your tracking is broken at the foundation, rules won’t save you.
What Conversion Value Rules Actually Are (And What They’re Not)
Conversion value rules let you tell Google: “When this conversion happens under these conditions, multiply its reported value by X.” That’s it. They don’t change your actual revenue data. They don’t change the conversion action itself. They adjust the value signal that Smart Bidding sees when making bid decisions in real time.
You can set rules based on three dimensions: audience (who the person is), location (where they are), and device (what they’re converting on). You can also stack conditions — for example, a rule that applies to users in a specific location who are also in a specific audience list.
Here’s why this matters mechanically: if you’re running tROAS or tCPA bidding, Smart Bidding is constantly calculating expected conversion value per auction and adjusting bids accordingly. Feed it flat, undifferentiated values, and it optimizes toward a reality that doesn’t exist. Feed it values that actually reflect your business economics, and suddenly it starts making smarter tradeoffs at the auction level.
Think of it this way: your marketing team knows that enterprise leads convert to customers at 3x the rate of SMB leads. Your sales team knows that customers in the Northeast have 40% higher average contract values. Conversion value rules are how you get that institutional knowledge into Google’s algorithm without needing a data science team to rebuild your bidding from scratch.
The Three Dimensions of Value Rules — And When Each One Actually Moves the Needle
1. Audience Value Rules
Audience value adjustments are the most powerful — and the most dangerous if you use gut feel instead of data.
The setup is straightforward: you apply a multiplier to conversions that came from users in a specific audience list. Common use cases include applying a higher value multiplier to conversions from existing customers (because their LTV is higher), or a lower multiplier to conversions from a suppressed audience you’re testing but don’t fully trust yet.
Where this gets impactful: if you’re running a SaaS product and you know from your CRM that enterprise-tier signups convert to paid customers at 4x the rate of free-tier signups, you can reflect that in your value rules. A trial signup from someone on your “enterprise intent” audience list might be worth $400 in real expected pipeline value, while a generic signup is worth $100. Tell Google that difference, and tROAS bidding will start fighting much harder for those high-value audiences in the auction.
If you’re running audience targeting with bid modifiers or observation layers, you’ve been doing half the job. Value rules let the algorithm internalize those differences rather than relying on static modifiers you set and forget.
The warning: don’t assign multipliers based on assumptions. Pull your actual CRM data. Segment conversion-to-close rates and average deal sizes by audience segment. If your enterprise audience genuinely closes at 3x the rate with 2x the contract value, a 5–6x value multiplier on those conversions is defensible. If you’re guessing, you’re just confusing the algorithm in a different direction.
2. Location Value Adjustments
This is the most underused lever in the tool, and for multi-market advertisers it’s arguably the highest-ROI configuration you can make in a single afternoon.
Location value adjustments let you apply multipliers based on country, state, region, city, or even postal code. The logic is simple: a conversion in a market where your average order value is higher, your close rates are better, or your service margins are stronger is worth more than an identical conversion in a weaker market.
Real example: a home services company running Google Ads across 12 metro areas. Their average job value in suburban Chicago is $850. In rural markets they also serve, average job value is $320. Running a single tROAS target across all of them means Smart Bidding is either overpaying in weak markets or underpaying in strong ones. Location-based value rules let you weight the Chicago conversions at 2.5x — and suddenly the algorithm is correctly prioritizing auction aggression in the markets that actually move revenue. We’ve covered this dynamic in detail in our guide on managing Google Ads across multiple locations.
The setup is found in Tools > Conversions > Value Rules. You create the rule, select “Location” as the condition, choose your geographic targeting, and set your multiplier. A multiplier of 1.5 means Google treats a conversion in that region as worth 50% more than the baseline value. A multiplier of 0.7 means it treats it as 30% less valuable.
3. Device Value Rules
Device-level value rules are the least commonly impactful of the three — but they’re worth considering for specific business models.
If your analytics show that mobile conversions have a significantly lower close rate or average order value than desktop (which is true in many B2B contexts), you can apply a downward multiplier to mobile conversions. This effectively tells Smart Bidding “yes, they converted, but this conversion is worth 60% of a desktop conversion” — which should soften mobile bid aggression without you having to manually manage device bid adjustments.
For most ecommerce businesses where mobile purchase rates are genuinely comparable, device value rules add complexity without proportional benefit. For B2B lead gen where a mobile form fill converts to a closed deal far less often than a desktop form fill? Absolutely worth testing.
How to Set Up Conversion Value Rules (Step by Step)
Before you touch the setup, make sure your conversion tracking is solid. Value rules built on broken conversion data are worse than no rules at all — you’re amplifying the wrong signal. If you haven’t verified your tracking recently, the guide on how to set up Google Ads conversion tracking correctly is the right place to start.
Here’s the setup process:
- Go to Tools & Settings > Measurement > Conversions. In the left navigation, you’ll see “Value Rules” — click it.
- Click the blue “+” button to create a new rule.
- Choose your condition type: Audience, Location, or Device. You can combine conditions within a single rule (e.g., Location = California AND Audience = Returning Customers).
- Define the condition: For audience rules, you’ll select from your existing audience lists. For location, you’ll pick from the standard Google Ads geographic hierarchy. For device, you’ll choose mobile, desktop, or tablet.
- Set the value adjustment: You have three options — multiply the value, add to the value, or set a fixed value. Multiplication is almost always the right choice because it scales proportionally with your actual conversion values rather than adding arbitrary flat amounts.
- Choose which conversion actions the rule applies to. You can apply it to all conversion actions or specific ones. For most accounts, applying rules only to your primary “Include in Conversions” actions is the cleanest setup.
- Set campaign eligibility. You can restrict which campaigns the rule applies to — useful if you’re testing rules before rolling them out account-wide.
One thing to note: value rules are applied in priority order if multiple rules could apply to the same conversion. Google applies the most specific rule that matches. If you have a rule for California and a separate rule for Los Angeles, the Los Angeles rule takes precedence for conversions in that city. Plan your rule hierarchy before you build it, not after.
The Relationship Between Value Rules and Smart Bidding (This Is Where It Gets Important)
Value rules only matter if Smart Bidding is using conversion value in its decision-making. That means they’re relevant for tROAS bidding and Maximize Conversion Value strategies — and less relevant for tCPA or Maximize Conversions, which optimize for conversion volume rather than value.
If you’re running tROAS and you have a 400% ROAS target, Google is bidding to achieve $4 of conversion value for every $1 spent. If your value rules are doing their job, the “conversion value” Google sees in each auction is a more accurate reflection of real business value — which means it’s making smarter tradeoffs about where to spend that dollar.
This is also where the interaction with your tROAS target gets interesting. When you implement value rules that realistically differentiate high-value from low-value conversions, your reported conversion value distribution changes. You may need to revisit your ROAS target after implementing rules — because if you’ve given high-value segments a 2x multiplier, your average conversion value in reporting goes up, and your tROAS target should probably go up with it to maintain the same real-world efficiency. Our breakdown of tCPA vs. tROAS bidding decisions covers the mechanics of setting and adjusting these targets in more depth.
The bottom line: value rules and Smart Bidding are a system. You can’t tune one without accounting for the other.
Common Mistakes That Wreck Value Rule Performance
Using multipliers based on intuition instead of data. A 3x multiplier on enterprise audience conversions sounds smart. If you don’t have CRM data showing that enterprise leads actually close at 3x the rate or generate 3x the revenue, you’re poisoning the algorithm. Pull your numbers first.
Setting value rules and never reviewing them. Your business economics change. The market where you dominated two years ago might now be oversaturated. The audience that was your highest LTV segment might have shifted. Value rules aren’t a set-it-and-forget-it feature. Review them quarterly alongside your CRM and revenue data.
Applying value rules to “secondary” conversion actions. If you track micro-conversions (page views, video watches, time on site) and accidentally apply a value rule to those, you’ve now inflated meaningless signals. Rules should apply to your primary, hard conversion actions only.
Stacking too many overlapping rules without a clear hierarchy. Three audience rules, two location rules, and a device rule that all apply to the same audience in the same location on mobile creates a confusing interaction. Simplify. Start with one or two high-impact rules and add complexity only when you have data to justify it.
Ignoring the attribution model interaction. The value that Smart Bidding sees is shaped by both your value rules AND your attribution model. A data-driven attribution model distributes conversion value across multiple touchpoints — which means your value rules are being applied to fractional conversion values. If your attribution model is last-click, all that value lands on the final click. The model you’re running significantly affects how value rules play out in practice. If you haven’t thought carefully about this, our article on Google Ads attribution models is essential reading before you go deep on value rules.
When Value Rules Won’t Help You (And What to Do Instead)
Value rules are not the right tool if your underlying conversion tracking is unreliable. If you’re not tracking the right events, if you have duplicate conversions firing, or if your conversion lag is so long that Smart Bidding is operating on outdated signals — fixing those foundations will move the needle more than any value rule configuration. Start with the fundamentals before you optimize the signal.
They’re also less impactful if your campaigns are too small to generate the conversion volume Smart Bidding needs to learn. If you’re getting fewer than 30–50 conversions per month per campaign, the algorithm doesn’t have enough data to act on nuanced value signals in the first place. In that scenario, focus on volume before you worry about value differentiation.
And if your business genuinely has similar economics across all segments, audiences, and locations — meaning a conversion is a conversion is a conversion — value rules add complexity without benefit. Not every account needs them. The question to ask is: “Do I have real data showing that conversions under certain conditions are meaningfully more or less valuable to my business?” If the answer is yes, value rules are worth the setup time. If the answer is “probably, maybe, I think so,” go validate the data first.
FAQ: Google Ads Conversion Value Rules
What’s the difference between conversion value rules and bid adjustments?
Bid adjustments are blunt instruments — you tell Google to bid X% more or less for a device, location, or audience. They work at the campaign level and apply uniformly. Conversion value rules are smarter: they adjust the value signal Smart Bidding uses to make auction-level decisions in real time. When Smart Bidding is running, value rules are generally the better tool because they work with the algorithm rather than overriding it.
Do conversion value rules work with Performance Max campaigns?
Yes — Performance Max campaigns support value rules, and they’re especially important in PMax because you have less direct control over bidding granularity. Value rules are one of the few meaningful levers you have to shape how PMax optimizes across its many placement types. If you’re running PMax, applying well-calibrated value rules is one of the higher-leverage configuration choices available to you.
Can I set a value rule that applies to multiple conditions at once?
Yes. You can combine conditions within a single rule — for example, “Audience = High LTV Customers AND Location = New York.” The rule only applies when all conditions are met. You can also have multiple separate rules, and Google will apply the most specific matching rule when conditions overlap.
How do I know if my value rules are actually working?
In your Conversions report, you can segment by “Value Rule Adjustment” to see how often rules are being applied and what value adjustments are being made. You should also monitor your campaign’s conversion value distribution over time after implementing rules — if they’re triggering correctly, you should see differentiation in reported values across audience segments, locations, or devices that reflects your rule logic.
Will value rules affect what I see in my conversion reporting?
Yes. The adjusted values are what show up in your Google Ads reporting by default. That means your reported ROAS figures will reflect the rule-adjusted values, not raw conversion values. This is important context when reporting performance internally — make sure stakeholders understand that reported conversion values include these adjustments, or you’ll get questions about discrepancies between Google Ads and your CRM. For a broader take on measuring performance accurately, see our guide on measuring Google Ads success beyond ROAS.
What multiplier should I start with?
Start with your data. Pull your CRM: what’s the average deal size or LTV for conversions from your highest-value audience segment vs. your average? If enterprise leads are worth 2.5x more in closed revenue over 12 months, a 2.5x multiplier is a reasonable starting point. If you genuinely have no data and are starting from scratch, a more conservative 1.5x or 2x multiplier limits downside risk while still giving Smart Bidding a meaningful signal to act on.
Do I need to update my tROAS target after implementing value rules?
Likely yes, especially if your rules meaningfully shift average reported conversion values upward. If your average conversion value was $100 before rules and increases to $150 after because high-value segments are getting 2x multipliers, your effective tROAS target should probably increase proportionally. Otherwise, Smart Bidding will think it’s exceeding its efficiency goal and may reduce spend. Monitor this in the weeks after implementation.
Getting This Right Is Worth Your Time
If you’re running Smart Bidding with a value-based strategy and you haven’t configured conversion value rules, you’re leaving optimization on the table. You’ve built a sophisticated bidding system and then fed it oversimplified data. That’s the gap value rules close.
The setup takes a few hours. The ongoing maintenance is a quarterly CRM review. The payoff — Smart Bidding that actually understands which conversions matter most to your business — compounds over time as the algorithm accumulates data and gets better at chasing the right signals.
If your current Google Ads setup doesn’t include value rules, but you’re running tROAS or Maximize Conversion Value with differentiated audiences, locations, or margins, that’s worth a conversation. The accounts we’ve seen get the most out of Smart Bidding are almost always the ones that put the most work into the quality of the value signals going in. Garbage in, garbage out — and better signals in, better performance out.
If you’d like a second set of eyes on your conversion value setup — or your Smart Bidding configuration more broadly — reach out to our team. We’ll tell you honestly what’s worth fixing and what’s already working.