Google Ads Conversion Tracking Tag

Key Takeaways

one of the most common ways to start tracking conversions in google ads is to import those actions from google analytics while this is still pretty effective it's not our only option in this video i want to go over the google ads conversion tracking tag there are three options on how you can install the tag on your website so we're going to cover those and then once those actions are being tracked within google ads we're going to go over what the different tracking statuses could mean to make sure that you are recording all the proper actions you want in your google ads account in order to get our conversion tracking tag we need to head to the conversions section in google ads to do this go up to your tools and settings and then under measurement we see conversions right now it looks like nothing is showing up that's because i have a filter set looking at just the website source conversion actions the other actions we have set up in this example account were ga4 conversions that we've set up and i created another video you can check out right here on how to import ga4 conversions because i know i said in the intro importing google analytics conversions is fairly common but the point of this video is website-based tag conversions and since i don't have any created for this example account we need to go to the blue plus button and click on it to open the options and how we can start tracking conversions in google ads as we can see there are a variety of options there's the import one i just talked about there are phone call conversions app specific conversions but the most common one and the only one i'm going to go over today is going to be the website website-based conversions so let's choose this one the first thing we need to do is to select a conversion action category so if we go down to this drop down that says select we see there are specific categories for sales leads there's a page view one under more but if none of the category options that are given make sense for you you can just select other for now i'm going to choose submit lead form and when i do you can see it changed the conversion name to submit lead form i'm going to update that soon but to get a better understanding of how conversion action categories could be useful i'm going to hop into a different client account in this client account i'm looking at the campaign level and my mouse is pretty much right over the conversions column so we see within this month this account is having a decent amount of conversions one thing that you can do when looking at conversions is go over to segment drop down to conversions and then you can segment your information by conversion category now even though i had to blur out the campaign names in this first one which has the most conversions we see around 33 of them were the submit lead form and there were about 11 and a half conversions that were labeled as other down below we see another example for phone call lead so it's going to be different depending on what conversion actions you have set up in your account you can segment by the actual conversion name that's going to be the conversion action option but for whatever reason if looking at the category of conversion is helpful for you to optimize that is why choosing the conversion action category in this tag setup can be helpful now that you know that let's hop back into the example account and we'll continue with the conversion tag setup alright as we cut back i already updated the conversion name just to save us some time so then we can look at value which is the next section you can choose use the same value for each conversion use different values for each conversion but i'm going to go against the recommendations and not use a value because this is just an example next choose how many conversions you want to count per click or interaction i'm going to leave my option as every every time someone submits this specific form i want it to count as a conversion in your account you may want to choose the other option of one if the same person comes back and submits the same form or performs the same conversion action multiple times you're only going to count it one time next you can choose your click through conversion windows and your view through conversion windows i'm going to leave it as is but go in and change it to whatever you want them to be next you can decide if you want to include this conversion action within the conversions column might seem silly but we're going to leave this as yes and next at the time of this video we can still choose the attribution model but just understand that pretty soon there will be some changes to the attribution settings in google ads now we're hoping to have a video on that one pretty soon so be on the lookout for that i'm going to skip over this enhanced cpc toggle so we can go to create and continue to keep moving along next we have a few different ways you can install the conversion tracking tag i'm going to hop around in the order we're going to look at this first we can go up to email the tag for whatever reason if you don't have access to the back end of your client's website or even your own website you can click on the email option go down below to the webmaster's email address field and then email the instructions to whomever can help you install the tag this is the most hands-off option if you have no idea what to do with the code this might be the safe route for you if you do have access to the website and you want to install the tag manually you can choose install the tag yourself and depending on how your site is built you can see the code for html which will be the default option or if you have a specific code for amp pages but i can go down highlight the piece of html code you can see it's all highlighted in blue this is the first part the global site tag and if we look at the gray text just above the html code you need to make sure that this tag is pasted in between the head tags of every page of the website this will be a one-time action and we're doing this because we don't have this tagged installed on our website yet you're gonna see with the website tag it's a two-part tag setup this is showing up because we have the toggle selected that the global site tag isn't on our website yet but let's assume we do have the global site tag added to every page of our site next we just need to look at the conversion action we can see the next step is to add the event snippet and you can choose if you want the snippet to fire on a page load or a specific click in this form that we have on our website the book us to speak form is going to be a specific page load after a user fills out the form we send them to a confirmation page so we will need to highlight this text again fortunately this is blurred out but after the aw that was our global site tag id then there will be a slash and then the string after that will be your actual conversion id so let's copy this and hop into the back end of my website so i'm on the confirmation submission page you can see it's the see a speak thank you page i'll have to go within the html and place this specific event snippet within the head tags just on this page then if everything is installed correctly we should see a conversion fire off within google ads for the bookis to speak conversion action that i just created this option does take a little bit more work but still fairly easy if you do have access to the back end of your website and are familiar with how to install tags within html coding but the third option as i scroll back up and the option i use all the time is using google tag manager again this option is assuming that you have access to the accounts tag manager and tag manager is properly installed on the website we do see the conversion id that was the part i blurred out from the global site tag in the previous options and then the conversion label that is the second half i had to blur out in the event snippet that came after the conversion id it's the same elements this is just a different way to install both the global site tag and the event snippet at the same time so now let's hop into google tag manager so we can see how we can install it this way when you're in google tag manager we can head up to new we want to create a new tag first you can rename the tag whatever you want it to be and then drop down to tag configuration you can click anywhere on this big rectangle then we need to choose the tag type and for this we need the fourth from the top option that is google ads conversion tracking i'm then going to hop into the conversion id field and paste in the option we saw in google ads then i'm going to go down to conversion label and copy and paste the conversion label text that google ads gave us for this specific conversion action you can then choose to add a specific value transaction id or currency code but for the most part those two options are the only thing you'll need so if we scroll down even further we need to get to our triggers that is going to be telling google when to fire off this conversion tag we have a few options in here so you can see we can make triggers from people who landed on specific pages clicked on certain links watch certain youtube videos so whatever actions you feel are important you can create a trigger to mark those actions as conversions now there is a see a speak option but it's people just landing on that initial page that's not the confirmation page so i'll need to go up and create a new trigger i typically like to make my trigger name the same as the tag name and then we need to choose a trigger configuration in our case it's a specific page view but you can see there are options just like specific element visibilities link clicks form submissions youtube videos a variety of different things but again we just need page view now i don't want this specific conversion action to fire on every single page on the website no we only want some page views and to make things easy i'm going to go if the page url contains see us speak thank you pretty much the confirmation url for this form if everything looks good i could save it that was just saving the trigger so now i want to save the entire tag and then you can go into preview mode which will send you to the website and then you can test out to see if the tag that you created is working we should probably do that shouldn't we okay let's do it click on preview i went in here and i pasted our website click connect now let's go to the see a speak page i'm gonna fill out a form here michelle's gonna get the submission and she's gonna be very mad at me and then i can click submit okay i submitted the form but what you can't see is when you open up tag assistant there is another window that's going to record all the actions that we're doing in preview mode so if i go back up and click on the other window so we can see on the top section if i move my mouse these are the tags that fired while i was in preview mode and one of the actions was bookus to speak conversion and it was only fired one time because i've only visited that page one time while in preview mode other options like a ga41 this facebook pixel id they fired multiple times because since i was in preview mode i visited multiple pages so it gives me good confidence that i have set up this book as to speak conversion tag properly now this window i'm in right here is still the tag assistant i need to go back up to the other tab i'm back in tag manager and now i need to submit this conversion tag i like to name my version tag and now i can publish it the tag is live it's now active on my website so let's hop back into google ads because we're not done creating this conversion yet if everything is installed on tag manager you've done preview mode you know it's working fine you can click next and then you can click done and there we see for this fake account our first conversion action that has a website source there's the category that we selected submit lead form but then the next column you see is tracking status and right now it's unverified this is brand new so now i want to go through what the different tracking statuses could mean if you've just installed the tag it could take a couple of hours for the first action to record it really depends on how many people are performing that action on your website so if it's been less than a day don't worry just give it time to have a signal so it can start recording most likely that's what's going to be the issue your tracking status could also say no recent conversions that means google can confirm the conversion tracking tag but there hasn't been any recorded versions within the last seven days if you see recording conversions this is the good one google can confirm your conversion tag and there has been recorded conversions within the last seven days you might see tag inactive that means the conversion tag whether it was installed manually or you're using tag manager is no longer visible to google plus they haven't recorded any conversions within the last seven days if it is still an active conversion for you you need to go and verify that the code is still on that page tracking status could be removed and if i hop back into this page we do see the green arrow here admins will have the option to click on it and remove this if they don't want it tracked as a conversion action right now my status is filtered just to enable conversion actions right here but if i select all actions it'll show removed options as well so that one's pretty clear but once you have conversion actions recorded you will be able to see the conversion action name as well as the categories showing up in your many views within google ads at any point if you need to edit any of the information there's a few things you can do clicking on the pencil will just edit the conversion action name but if you actually click on the blue text portion you can still go down and edit the settings and it's pretty much back to where we started to create the tag maybe you want to play with a different attribution model while we still can change how often this conversion action is counted add a value to it change the category you can do that for whatever reason if your code gets deleted something's not working you need to try to reinstall it also within the settings we see the tag setup giving us the same three options and how we installed the tag this is going to be very common if for whatever reason your account or your client's account launched a new website maybe urls changed the coding on how certain events that you're tracking changed you can still keep the same conversion tags just update how the event snippet is firing on the new website but i don't need to change anything and i can go back i still have certain accounts where i import the information from google analytics because the client prefers the numbers to be as closely matched as possible it's just better for their internal reporting i have other clients based on how they're tracking google ads performance in their crm who feel that the internal numbers match better when we use the google website tag use whichever option you feel gives you the most accurate results it's going to make it a lot easier for you to make the right optimization decisions i still feel google tag manager is the easiest way to implement this plus tag manager gives us a variety of options on how we can fire the conversion tags on more than just the page view option i showed you in this example if you want to track specific conversion actions that are more action-based thinking more along the lines of event tracking it's a lot easier to install those conversion tags with tag manager than having those manually coded into the site if you have any more questions about the conversion takes setup for google ads or maybe you need additional information on what triggers you can create within tag manager to make more conversion actions please let us know in the comments below thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe you