Conversion Tracking

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is conversion tracking?

Conversions are those valuable actions, like sales or leads, that are generated on your website following a click. Conversions are really important to measure if you’re to understand the value that your paid search campaign is driving. It shows you what valuable actions a person took on your website after they click on your ad.

Single source of truth

Conversions can be measured through Google Ads, but also through Google Analytics or your preferred website analytics tool. It’s very important to decide on your ‘single source of truth’ here. So, if you’re using Google Analytics for all of your channel reporting, use Google Analytics reporting for Google Ads too. It’s not good practice to mix or use different reporting standards for how you’re measuring your conversions. You need to find a standard approach and stick to it. This is your ‘single source of truth’. This is the reporting tool where all metrics are the same across different channels.

Conversions and KPIs

The conversions you track will, in many cases, be your KPIs. Most websites will have different conversions with different outcomes and values to their businesses, but typical examples of conversion types include leads, purchases, phone calls, and downloads.

Leads and purchases are clear cut but tracking phone calls require a little more digging. Remember, when you click an ad on Google from your mobile device, you can call the advertiser directly without even visiting their website. The length of that phone call can be measured, the time of the day, and other details can be tracked back to that ad. So, if you drive a number of phone calls from Google Ads to your sales team, and those calls were all ten minutes or more, that might indicate they were good sales calls.

As you can see, adding conversion tracking allows you to track the number of valuable actions taken by users from a campaign back to the campaign and keyword. This will have an associated cost and will also provide other metrics, which will enable you to determine if it’s profitable or scalable.

It’s quite straightforward to add conversion tracking to Google Ads.

Tracking conversions in Google Ads

There are two ways to track conversions in Google Ads.

Add tracking code

The first way is to add a piece of tracking code, which is found in Conversions area within the Tools tab in Google Ads, to the Thank You or Confirmation page that follows a conversion. This is the page displayed after a user contacts the team, downloads a piece of content, or completes an ecommerce purchase, for example. This page is only ever displayed after a conversion, so every time it’s displayed, your piece of code on that page tells Google Ads that a conversion has happened.

Import conversions

The second way to track conversions in Google Ads is to import conversions or ecommerce data from your Google Analytics account. This will also attribute ecommerce sales and the various conversions you have set up in Google Analytics back to your keywords and ads. Importing Google Analytics conversions and transaction data is a much simpler way to create conversions in Google Ads and also means that you are working off a single source of truth.

Users or customer relationship management (CRM) tools can take this a step further. Many CRMs allow you to link contact or record creation as a Conversion event for Google Ads. This means that you can sync your CRM lead generation, deals, or sales activities back to your campaigns.