Google Ads Conversion Tracking | Complete Guide

Conversion tracking for Google Ads is a daunting task to tackle. Every step of the way, you may be questioning yourself and your abilities, with new terminology popping up in just about every step of the process. 

But with this comprehensive guide, we walk you through each step of the process until the task is complete. If you need someone to help you set up your Google Ads, SCOPE has experienced certified specialists waiting to assist you. 

What is conversion tracking in Google Ads?

If you want to configure Google Ads conversion tracking, you need to know what it’s all about. Tracking your conversions allows you to see how many times valuable actions have resulted from users viewing your ads. 

Many things can be tracked as conversions e.g. purchases made, sign-up forms completed, or even landing page views. If the goal of your ad campaign is lead generation, you’ll generally want to track calls booked, or sign-up forms completed. 

Why it’s important to track conversions in Google Ads

Conversion tracking in Google Ads is fundamental to your ad campaign as it lets you calculate ROI (return on investment) and figure out which ads are the most profitable. This way, you can optimise your ad campaigns to bring the best results while reducing the budget of ads that aren’t working. 

Google Ads can be costly, especially if they are not optimised correctly. To get a better idea of how much you should be planning to spend on your Google Ads campaign, visit our Google Ads cost calculator. 

Types of conversions that can be tracked in Google Ads

When creating a conversion action for your Google Ads campaign, you’ll get to choose between a variety of conversion types. Ensure that the option you are choosing is the most relevant to your PPC campaign. 

1. Website actions

Website action is the most commonly used conversion type and can refer to any kind of action taken on the website after clicking through from a Google Ad. Depending on the goal of the campaign, this can be a form submission, online purchase, landing page visit, or button clicks. Find out about some of the more popular website actions below:

Form Submissions

If the aim of your campaign is to collect data, get event sign-ups, or encourage your audience to download a freebie in exchange for their personal data, using a form submission conversion action is ideal. 

Online Purchase

For those running e-commerce or SaaS Google Ads, the goal is often to make an immediate sale, whether that be for products or services. In that case, an online purchase is the ideal conversion type to track. 

Landing Page Visit

If the goal of your campaign is to increase visibility and brand awareness, then landing page visits are a decent conversion metric. While this does make it harder to calculate ROI, you can still measure the number of users who interacted with your ad and were interested enough to click through to your website.

Button Click

A button click doesn’t tell you if a person went through with the next steps i.e. filled in the form, booked a meeting, etc. It is useful for measuring conversions if a button takes the user to an off-site URL (in which case the conversion itself can’t be tracked). For example, if you are using Calendly to schedule calls, you won’t actually be able to measure whether the meeting was booked, as Calendly creates URLs on its own site, not on yours. 

This way, the best way to track conversions is to measure whether or not someone clicked on the button. 

2. Phone calls

A phone call conversion type is simply a call to your business that was initiated through the Google Ad. Adding your phone number to a Google Ad is an extension that tends to increase conversion rates, and is an easy-to-track metric. 

If you need the Google Ads phone number for South Africa, we encourage you to reach out to get expert support. Be sure to have your 10-digital account ID on hand.

3. Imported or offline conversions

If you are using a CRM, you can import conversions that took place offline, or over the phone into your Google Ads campaign. Unfortunately, this will require some manual effort on the part of your sales team, who will need to record when these sales happened and ask the customer how they heard about your company. 

4. App instals or in-app conversions

This conversion type is only applicable to businesses that are promoting an app in their Google Ads campaigns. This conversion will track whenever the app is downloaded, or specific actions taken within the app. 

Categories of conversions

While there are many conversion categories in Google Ads, they have been divided into these three classifications. 

Lead categories

Lead category refers to website actions that result in a potential new client. Things like booking a call, submitting a lead form, or requesting a quote all fall into this category. 

Sales categories

The sales category covers everything from subscribing to a recurring service, adding an item to a cart, to initiating a final checkout. 

Further categories

Further categories cover literally everything else. These allow you to set up unique conversions outside of the usual leads and sales conversions. 

How to set up conversion tracking in Google Ads

To set up conversion tracking on Google Ads, you’ll need to make sure you have access to the following: 

1. A website where you can insert your conversion tracking code from Google Ads. 
2. You’ll need to have edit access to the backend of the website, where you can paste your snippet of code. If you do not have access, you can always contact the developer working on that website and ask them to insert the code snippet for you. 

If you have access to the backend of the website and are able to insert a code snippet, then you can begin the process of setting up conversion tracking on Google Ads. First, you’ll be setting up a conversion action in Google Ads, and then you’ll be installing your Google Tag. 

Creating a conversion action

The very first step of setting up conversion tracking on Google Ads is to create a conversion action. Follow this step-by-step guide to create a conversion action: 

• Log in to your Google Ads account. 
• Locate the trophy icon marked ‘goals’ on the left side of your screen. Then click on ‘summary’ under the head term ‘conversions’.
• Then click on the ‘new conversion action’ button. 

• Next, you’ll need to decide which type of conversion you would like to track. Refer to our  ‘types of conversions’ section to decide which is best for your particular situation. Choose between:
  • Website
  • App
  • Phone calls
  • Import

Website conversions are the most common when tracking Google Ads conversions. This is used for tracking online sales, link clicks, page views, and sign-ups driven by your Google Ads campaign. These are the steps you should take for setting up a website conversion. 

• Click on ‘website’. You’ll be prompted to enter your domain name e.g. https://scope.co.za. Once you have filled in your domain name, click the ‘scan’ button on the right. 
• Scroll down and click ‘add conversion action manually’. 

• Next, you’ll need to select your goal category that best describes the conversion you are trying to track. Choose one of the following: 
  • Purchase
  • Add to cart
  • Begin checkout
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
  • Submit lead form
  • Book appointment
  • Sign-up
  • Request quote
  • Get directions
  • Outbound click
  • Page view
  • Other

• Next, you’ll need to name your conversion, e.g. Sign-Up Form submission. 
• You’ll then want to assign a value to your conversion so that Google Ads understands how much each conversion is worth.

Suppose you know that each time a form is submitted on one of your landing pages, it results in a $500 job.

To reflect this, you can assign a value of $500 to the conversion action associated with completing a form on that particular landing page.

This approach enables you to develop a bidding strategy that maximises ROI by allocating more budget to ads that generate higher-value conversions. This is particularly useful when you are running a campaign that uses multiple kinds of conversions. 

If all your conversions are of equal value, you can click ‘Don’t use a value for this conversion action’.

• Next, you’ll need to decide whether every conversion is tracked, or only one is counted per event from an ad. Generally, you will only want to count one so that you are not counting multiple conversions per user session. 

• Then you’ll want to fill out the rest of the information required on the page. Read the explanations below to understand each metric Google Ads requires from you: 
  • Click through conversion window: Conversions may occur several days after a person interacts with your ad. Choose the time frame within which you want to track and count conversions after an ad interaction.
  • Engaged-view conversion window: Choose the duration for tracking conversions following initial engagement.
  • View-through conversion window: Choose the maximum period after someone views your ad during which you want to count view-through conversions.
  • Attribution: The attribution model assigns credit to each ad interaction based on its contribution to your conversions.
  • Enhanced conversion: Leverage user-provided data from your website to attribute conversions to ads while maintaining privacy.

You will then need to choose between tracking with a Google Ads Tag or Google Tag Manager. Below you will find instructions for each of these options. 

Implementing tracking with a Google Ads tag

Once you have created the action, it’s time to add the Google tag to your website. If you have edit access to your website, you will need to paste the provided code in the <head> of your website. If not, ask your web developer if they can add it for you. 

Implementing tracking with Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager helps you set up conversion tracking without the developer-level knowledge necessary to add code to your website. 

1. If you are using a WordPress website, you can manage Google Tag Manager from the backend of your website by installing Google Site Kit. 

2. Once Site Kit has been installed, you will need to grab your conversion ID from your Google Ads account. This can be seen once you choose the Google Tag Manager option after creating your conversion action. 

Understanding Google Ads conversion tracking data

Once you have set up conversion tracking on Google Ads, it should automatically appear in your report. You can also add additional metrics to the report once conversion tracking has been set up to better understand whether your Google Ad campaign is worthwhile. 

Cost per conversion

Cost per conversion will tell, on average, how much each of your conversions has cost you. This is a great metric to use to discover if your ad campaign is paying for itself. It works by dividing your total campaign cost by the total number of conversions. 

Conversion rate

The conversion rate metric tells you what percentage of the users that click on your ad actually convert. This number shows you if there is room to optimise your landing page to improve the conversion rate. It’s calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of interactions. 

Total conversion value

If you want to see the sum of all of your conversions, this adds up each conversion value to create a total. This is only useful if you entered a ‘conversion value’ that is accurate when setting up your conversion tracking. 

Conversion value per cost

Conversion value per cost is a great way to see your ROI. It takes the total conversion value and divides it by the total ad cost so you can see if your ads are worthwhile. 

Conversion value per click

This metric shows you your total conversion value divided by the total number of click interactions on your ad. 

Value per conversion

This metric helps you to decipher how much each of your conversions is worth. It is particularly helpful if you have multiple types of conversions set up. It is calculated by dividing your total conversion value by the number of conversions. 

SCOPE’s all-inclusive Google Ads Services 

Setting up Google Ads and conversion tracking can be a monumental task for anyone without experience, and choosing the right Google Ad specialist can be a challenge.

As one of the best Google Ads agencies in South Africa, we handle the entire process from start to finish, setting up the Google Ad campaign and tracking, and optimising the ads on a daily basis to ensure we’re maximising your conversions. 

Ready to get your Google Ads journey started with SCOPE Digital Agency? We’re experts who have proven experience, set up a meeting with us today!

FAQs