On March 8, 2021 we're disabling mutates to the Lead category in the AdWords API. The Google Ads API ConversionActionCategory is not affected. This is a follow-on to the conversion category changes and expanded conversion categories announced in September 2020, which provided a finer grained categorization of conversions.

We are making this change because we are seeing some advertisers change their new category conversion types back to Lead category through the AdWords API, resulting in ambiguity since multiple new categories map to this old category. The following table summarizes how the AdWords API will respond to mutates that set the conversion category to Lead.

Existing Category	AdWords API READs (Existing behavior)	AdWords API Mutate to LEAD Response
Lead	Lead	OK
“Old” category	“Old” category	ERROR
“New” lead category	Lead	OK
“New” non-lead category	“Old” category	ERROR

Since the AdWords API does not support all the new conversion categories, reading in a new fine grained Lead conversion category will be mapped to Lead upon read, but will continue to be persisted as the finer grained new category. If read through the Google Ads UI or Google Ads API, the new conversion category will be accurately retrieved.

As a recap from our September 2020 announcement, here is the mapping of new conversion category types to existing AdWords API ConversionTracker.Category enum values:

New Conversion Category	Mapping to ConversionTracker.Category
Add to cart	LEAD
Begin checkout	LEAD
Purchase	PURCHASE
Subscribe	PURCHASE
Sign-up	SIGNUP
Phone call lead	LEAD
Imported lead	LEAD
Submit lead form	LEAD
Book appointment	LEAD
Request quote	LEAD
Get directions	LEAD
Outbound click	LEAD
Contact	LEAD
Download	DOWNLOAD
Page view	PAGE_VIEW
Engagement	DEFAULT
Store visit	DEFAULT
Store sale	PURCHASE
Other	DEFAULT

If you have any questions or need additional help, contact us via the forum.
David Wihl, Google Ads API Team