Google’s new “Performance by stage” card on the Ads Overview page, documented on 8 October 2026, groups campaign metrics into Awareness, Consideration, and Action stages and adds video impressions to conversion paths. For B2B SaaS, the critical fine print is what the card leaves out: its conversion figures count only biddable conversions, and the new video-impression path data excludes conversions imported from Google Analytics 4. If you optimise to CRM-imported SQLs or closed-won revenue — as a well-run SaaS account should — the funnel card can under-represent exactly the pipeline you care about.
This post explains what the card actually shows, why “biddable conversions only” and the GA4 exclusion matter specifically for B2B SaaS, when the card is genuinely useful, and why a richer conversion-path diagram is still not evidence of causation. The short version: treat it as a convenient view of upper-funnel activity, never as the source of truth for pipeline.
What the Performance by stage card actually shows
The card sorts metrics into three funnel stages. Awareness and Consideration carry impression-style metrics — impressions, CPM, frequency, views, and video completion rate — while Action carries conversion insights. When Brand Lift, Search Lift, or Conversion Lift studies are configured, their results can surface in the relevant stage, which is the card’s most genuinely useful feature: it puts causal measurement next to the vanity metrics it is meant to discipline. Alongside the card, the Conversion paths view now counts video impressions as steps, flagged with an eye icon, so you can see where an unclicked video exposure sat on the path to a conversion.
For a B2B SaaS team this is a reasonable dashboard for YouTube, Demand Gen, and other upper-funnel activity, where awareness and consideration metrics are the actual objective. It maps cleanly onto the funnel-intent thinking we use for campaign design in campaign structure by funnel intent tiers. The problem starts the moment you try to read the Action stage as your pipeline number — because of two exclusions that are easy to miss.
Why “biddable conversions only” distorts a SaaS account
The card’s Conversions and Conversion Lift figures count only biddable conversions — the actions you have told Smart Bidding to optimise toward. That sounds reasonable until you remember how a mature B2B SaaS account is configured. The best setups keep their most meaningful, lowest-volume events — SQLs, opportunities, closed-won — as secondary or imported actions precisely so they inform analysis without destabilising bidding on thin data. Those are often non-biddable, which means the card will quietly omit them from the Action stage.
The result is a systematic bias: the card over-weights the higher-volume, lower-intent action you bid on (a trial start or a form fill) and under-weights the pipeline-quality events you actually judge the account by. A head of growth glancing at the Action stage could conclude the account is producing little, when the real pipeline — living in the CRM — is healthy. This is the same reason we argue the account should optimise for SQLs, not leads, and it is why the five numbers a board should watch are not the ones a platform dashboard surfaces by default.
The GA4-import exclusion and who it hits
The second exclusion is narrower but catches a lot of B2B SaaS accounts: the video impressions newly added to conversion paths cover only eligible web conversions, and conversions imported from Google Analytics 4 are not included. Many SaaS teams route conversions through GA4 — it is a common, Google-endorsed pattern — which means their conversion-path view will show an incomplete picture of how video exposure related to those conversions. If your tracking depends on GA4 imports, the new path data is not wrong so much as blind to your setup.
This is worth putting next to the other measurement fault lines we have covered this year: the GA4 and Google Ads consent split and the broader question of which attribution model your reporting rests on. The practical takeaway is to know your own conversion plumbing before you read any Google-native funnel view: if SQLs arrive via offline import and web conversions via GA4, large parts of this card are structurally incomplete for you, and that is a property of your (correct) setup, not a problem to fix.
When to trust the card — and when to ignore it
Use the card where its inputs are complete and meaningful: upper-funnel, video, and Demand Gen campaigns, where impressions, frequency, and completion rate are the real objective and where an attached Brand or Conversion Lift study gives the Action stage causal weight. In that context it is a tidy, single-screen read on whether awareness spend is doing awareness work, which pairs well with how we think about measuring pipeline from Google Ads.
Be sceptical of it for bottom-funnel Search optimised to CRM-imported or non-biddable conversions, where the Action stage is structurally under-counted. For those campaigns, your source of truth is the CRM, not the Overview page, and the card should inform — never override — a budget decision. A useful rule: if the number on the card disagrees with the number in your CRM, the CRM wins, and the gap is usually explained by one of the two exclusions above rather than by real performance.
A richer conversion path is still not proof of causation
Finally, resist the pull of the new video-impression path data. Seeing an unclicked video impression on the path to a conversion is suggestive, but Google itself cautions that an impression appearing in a conversion path does not prove the impression caused the conversion. Conversion-path data shows correlation and sequence, not contribution — and for channels like video and Demand Gen that trade heavily on view-through credit, the temptation to over-read it is exactly where measurement goes wrong.
The only way to know whether ads caused incremental conversions is an incrementality test. That is what Conversion Lift for Search and PMax and Search Lift measurement exist to provide, and it is why the most valuable thing on the Performance by stage card is a lift study docked into it — not the impression counts around it. The card makes the funnel easier to see; it does not make correlation into cause.
Make your reporting match your pipeline
The Performance by stage card is a fine upper-funnel dashboard and a misleading pipeline report for a B2B SaaS account that optimises to CRM-imported SQLs — and knowing which one you are looking at is the whole skill. Read it for awareness and consideration; read the CRM for pipeline; and treat any disagreement as one of the two exclusions, not a performance signal.
If your Google-native reporting and your CRM tell different stories, a Google Ads audit reconciles them and shows where biddable-only and GA4-import gaps are distorting your view, and our Google Ads management service builds reporting that reads pipeline the way your board does. To sanity-check your conversion tracking in ten minutes, run the free 10-point audit checklist.