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How to Track Conversions & Leads From Google Ads
Tracking leads from Google Ads is essential to ensure you’re measuring the impact of your paid campaigns.
So your Google Ads are set up.
Now, you’re watching your ads and keywords generate an impressive number of impressions and clicks.
But what about leads? And even more importantly, what about sales and revenue? When you’re investing in paid ads, you need to be sure that you’re getting a good return.
In fact, we found that 31% of marketers find proving ROI is one of their biggest challenges. And it’s no surprise.
So, in this blog, we’re going to go through:
So, let’s dive right in.
Google Ads conversion tracking is a powerful tool developed by Google that allows you to identify how well your ad campaign is performing.
It measures set actions that occur after a customer interacts with your advert. This could range from calling your business to filling in a form on your website.
Related: Complete guide to PPC conversion tracking
The data you get allows you to identify what’s working and what isn’t, so you can optimise your ads, copy, keywords and landing pages accordingly.
Once you’ve identified your chosen conversions, it’s easy to set your PPC conversion tracking up across all of your campaigns.
⚡️ Pro Tip
Do you struggle with offline conversions? Tracking things like calls doesn’t have to be a chore. In fact, you can automate your offline conversions and push lead and revenue data where you need it most.
Read our complete guide to offline conversion tracking
If you’re an eCommerce business, then you can usually see accurate revenue data directly in Google Analytics and Google Ads.
Related: How to get revenue data into Google Analytics
But what if a user clicks your PPC ad early on in their customer journey, but converts much later and via a different channel?
That sale will go unattributed and your ROAS will be unreliable.
And it’s even worse for B2B companies.
While you might be able to track lead generation by counting the volume of form submissions, what about offline conversions like phone calls?
How can you attribute any conversion directly back to your PPC campaign?
And, if your PPC ad forms one small part of a customer journey, how are you ensuring that it still gets part of the credit?
This is where PPC conversion tracking comes in.
The best bit about Google Ads conversion tracking is that Google is smart enough to take your data and automatically convert it into audience profiles, meaning you can paint a clear picture of your customers.
There are three main reasons why lead tracking with Google Ads, in isolation, isn’t enough to understand your marketing and its impact on sales.
Call conversion tracking is a necessary tool when setting up PPC campaigns.
But what about all those calls you’re generating from organic search, or through social?
Related: How to track phone calls in Google Analytics
If your Google ads play a role in engaging users at the start of their buyer’s journey, but users then call you later in the customer journey, you’re not going to be able to connect that data.
While it’s great to track leads, only tracking leads means you’re missing vital data.
Related: Full guide to lead tracking
Do you know how many of those leads are converting into sales? And how are you tracking the individual journeys of users clicking on your ads?
⚡️ Pro Tip
Want to track your customer journeys and loop your closed sales back to your marketing? Download our closed-loop eBook to learn how to attribute your revenue using Ruler
There is a wide range of conversions that you can track using Google Ads. Here are the four main groups to get you started:
1) Webpage: If you want to track an action on your web pages, such as an online purchase, a form submission, or content download
2) Call on-site: If you want to track phone calls from a mobile device
3) App download: If you want to track app downloads (both for Android and iOS) or app purchase activity
4) Import: If you use offline conversions such as phone calls, or use a sales team to nurture form submissions, then you can import your offline conversion data.
Related: How to optimise your Google Ads campaign with offline conversion tracking
Setting up Google Ads conversion tracking does require adding HTML code to your website, particularly into pages customers will visit immediately after completing a particular campaign e.g. an order confirmation page.
Get started by clicking, Tools and Analysis tab in Google Ads and then select Conversions from the drop-down menu.
You’ll be taken to the All conversions page.
Click on the conversions tab and then click the +conversion button to create your first conversion.
Click website. Select a conversion type, e.g book an appointment or sign-up.
Next to the ‘Conversion name’, enter a name for the conversion you want to track. This could be ‘newsletter sign up’ or ‘contact us form submission’.
This name will be used to identify conversions in reports.
Then, next to value, select how to track the value of each conversion.
You can add an amount that reflects the value of the action. Or, you can use real costs to track prices. You’ll need to customise your tag to track transaction-specific values.
Next to count, select how to count your conversions.
‘One’ is best for leads, when only one conversion per ad click adds value for your business, e.g. a sign-up form.
‘Every’ is best for sales, where every conversion adds value, e.g. a sale.
Then, click conversion window.
Here you can choose how long you want to track conversions for. The maximum length is 90 days.
Then click view-through conversion window. This max is 30 days.
Click to include in ‘conversions’. This setting (which is defaulted), lets you decide if you want to include data in your reporting column.
Finally, select your attribution type.
Ideally, you would select data-driven but you need a certain amount of conversion data to use this model
Related: Learn more about Google Analytics attribution
Click create and continue. The screen will show you’ve created your conversion action.
The next step is to set up your tag on your website.
To set up website conversion tracking for the first time, you’ll need to add two code snippets to your website: the global site tag and the event snippet.
The global site tag needs to be coded into every page of your website. You only need one global site tag for each Google Ads account.
Meanwhile, every conversion you want to track needs its own event snippet and needs to be installed on the site page for which you want to track that conversion.
There are two ways to install your tags:
Option 1: Install the tag yourself
Option 2: Use Google Tag Manager
Here’s an easy walk-through from Google themselves on how to add the conversion tracking tag regardless of which method you choose.
Once your conversion tracking is all set up, you can start reporting.
You’ll find all the data on your conversions in the Campaigns tab at the ad group, ads, and keywords levels.
Click the Columns tab, then Conversions, to customise which columns appear.
Some of the basic columns include:
Conv. (1-per-click): Counts each time you receive one or more conversions from a single ad-click. You can use this number to approximate the number of new customers you’re getting.
Cost / conv. (1-per-click): Displays your cost (how much you spent on clicks) divided by your total conversions. This helps you measure your return on investment (ROI). Ideally, you should be spending less on clicks than you’re earning on conversions.
Conv. rate (1-per-click): Shows the percentage of clicks that resulted in conversions. The higher the percentage, the more effectively the ads or keywords are performing.
View-through conv.: Measures the number of times a customer viewed, but did not click on, your ad and later went through with a conversion.
Google Ads conversion tracking allows us to better track conversions that happen from paid.
But what it doesn’t do is allow you to connect a click from paid to a later conversion via direct.
And this is where Google Ads lead tracking falls short.
Because while lead tracking is important, it’s not enough in isolation.
The only way to fill this gap is to use marketing attribution
Related: Complete guide to marketing attribution
Attribution allows you to track users at every step of the customer journey.
So, when they close, you can definitively tie their closed revenue back to influencing marketing channels and touchpoints.
Let’s look at how it works in practice.
So you want to track more than your Google Ads conversions. And, you want to see how other channels play a role in your conversions?
It sounds complicated but it doesn’t have to be.
Marketing attribution with Ruler Analytics means you can track every conversion and lead (plus all of their interactions with your website).
But, even better, you can credit closed revenue back to your marketing channels, campaigns and adverts.
Related: How Ruler attributes revenue to your marketing
Let’s use an example.
Sara visits your website for the first time via a PPC advertising campaign. But, she doesn’t convert. She visits again from a retargeted Facebook advert. Again, she doesn’t convert.
A few weeks later, she searches for you organically and converts by filling in a form requesting a demo of your product.
Related: How Ruler Analytics affects paid strategy
Here, Ruler will fire all of this customer journey data to your CRM. So, you’ll have all the data you need to convert her into a sale.
When she sits her demo a few weeks later and closes into a sale, Ruler fires the revenue data associated with her in your CRM to your analytics tools.
It means you can see closed revenue in your Google Ads dashboard, your Facebook Business Manager and Google Analytics.
Related: Everything you can discover in Ruler Analytics
Even better, in Ruler, you can switch between attribution model types to see how your revenue fluctuates per channel, per campaign and even per keyword!
Getting set up with multi-touch attribution is simple. Book a demo with our team of experts and they’ll show you how simple it is to get started with attribution.
Add a simple bit of code to your website, and you’re pretty much ready to get started!
Plus remember, we integrate with thousands of other apps meaning you can send data to and from whichever tools you need to.
Whether it’s Google Ads, Facebook or your CRM, we can integrate with the tools you need, so you can get the right data in the right places.
