Do you find yourself taking a rough guess of how many of your leads or purchases came directly from your Google Ads campaigns? Wouldn’t it be easier for Google to work all this out for you?
Although clicks can tell you a lot in regards to your ads and keywords, they don’t tell you how people act once they reach your website. Not every click on your ads are going to lead to a conversion (unfortunately!), just like how you don’t always buy something every time you walk into a shop – but without conversion tracking, there is no way to truly tell your conversion rate.
But what is a conversion?
Google defines a conversion as “an action that’s counted when someone interacts with your ad and then takes an action that you’ve defined as valuable to your business, such as an online purchase or a call to your business from a mobile phone”. Once you have decided which actions you would like to track as conversions, then it will take just a few steps to begin tracking this within your campaign.
How is it set up?
Many advertisers believe that setting up conversion tracking is a lot harder than it actually is. Many of the tools used for conversion tracking are free and very simple to use.
Google Ads itself allows you to measure specific conversions on any page of your website. This involves generating HTML code that you can paste onto the webpage that customers visit after completing an action that you value. This could be the page that they reach after they complete their purchase or form submission, such as a “thank you” page.
As a PPC agency, we take advantage of Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, in addition to Google Ads, when setting up conversion tracking. Tag Manager gets implemented on your website and this is used to set up tracking for actions such as calls from your website. We also use this to track clicks of specific buttons where confirmation pages are not available. You may be thinking “I have a form on my website but there is no separate page to track for this”, but don’t worry. With Tag Manager, we can set up tracking for every time a user clicks the “submit” button on one of your forms, for example.
What will it tell me?
Using tools including Google Ads, Tag Manager & Analytics, conversions will be set up on specific pages/actions which will then cause each conversion to trigger once an action has been completed. Therefore, you will know how much each of these leads/purchases has cost you on average, which actions are being completed the most, which keywords/ads generate the most conversions and what your average conversion rate is – alongside much more.
The information gathered from tracking click-through rates (CTRs) and other online interactions with conversion tracking can help to boost your return on investment and the number of sales/leads you receive as you’re then able to make choices based on the information in front of you.
Additionally, Google Analytics is used to delve further into each conversion and uncover details that aren’t available to you in Google Ads. You can see details of the conversion paths taken by your customers, whether this is just from Google Ads or across multiple channels. It also allows you to see how many of your visitors from Google Ads converted on other channels such as organically or directly.
How is it going to benefit my business?
Tracking conversion will then tie the traffic you’re sending to your website to specific keywords, ads, campaigns and more within your Google Ads account. With this data, you, as an advertiser, now know which of your keywords and ads are leading to people completing valuable actions on your website. However, this information isn’t restricted to Google Ads itself. It helps you decide how your budget should be allocated across different platforms and campaigns such as display, shopping, search, social media, organic (SEO) and more.
This also opens up the opportunity to take advantage of Google’s automated bidding strategies such as Maximise Conversions and Target CPA. These are two of Google’s fully automated bidding strategies where no individual keyword bids are set manually. Google chooses CPCs based on the goals of each bidding strategy. Maximise Conversions is designed to get as many conversions whilst spending your daily budget. With Target CPA, you set a target cost per conversion and Google will adjust bids to get as many conversion at possible at your target. Therefore, by having conversion tracking implemented, you’d be able to take advantage of strategies like the above.
You can also create audiences based on users who have completed specific conversion actions through Google Ads and Analytics. There is the potential to exclude audiences like these to focus campaigns to generating new acquisitions as opposed to spending money on those who have already converted in the past.
Handy, right?
What should I be tracking?
One of the best things about conversion tracking is that you’re not just limited to tracking one action – you can track anything you want! However, we know that this still doesn’t stop some advertisers from tracking just one action such as phone calls, newsletter subscriptions or form submissions for example.
Tracking multiple actions allows you to keep an eye on which actions generate the most leads for you, as well as giving you a further insight into what users do on your website before they get in touch.
Additionally, there may be actions on your website, such as subscribing to a newsletter, which you feel are invaluable as you don’t directly get sales or enquiries from this. However, it may be the case that people who leave their email to subscribe to your newsletter, get put into your email marketing campaign and then come back later on (whether it’s tomorrow, next week or next month) to enquire or purchase from you. Therefore, by tracking newsletter subscriptions and optimising data based around this, alongside other actions, you will be able to drive more users to subscribe to your newsletter in the hopes that they’ll eventually come back and convert from your email marketing.
If you’re looking for specific actions which are definites for tracking, then see below.
Phone calls – If phone calls lead to enquiries, then this is something that you should be tracking in Google Ads. There are 3 options when setting up call tracking in Google Ads; track calls from ads, calls to a phone number on your website and clicks to a number on your mobile website.
Form submissions – Again, if a user submitting a form generates a lead for you, then this is a definite when setting up conversion tracking. You can track the page that the user reaches once they’ve submitted the form if the URL changes, such as a “Thank You” page, or you can track the click of the “Send” or “Submit” button on the form itself.
Purchases – If you’re an e-commerce site, then there is no doubt about setting up tracking for purchases. You can use Google Analytic’s e-commerce tracking to see the value of each conversion based on what the user has purchased. You can also do this throughout Google Ads itself.
So what now?
At the end of the day, you should be tracking any action that generates a lead or purchase on your website to enable optimisations within the account to be based on the most accurate information that you have.
Still unsure how to set this up or what to track? Don’t worry, that’s what we’re here for! All conversion tracking is included within our PPC management package… for free! But we don’t just stop at conversion tracking. You will find Product Feed Optimisation and Click Fraud Protection also included within our service!
Want to know more? Call our PPC experts right now!
