Google Ads Conversion Tracking Tutorial - Google Tag Manager & Google Analytics 4

Key Takeaways

what's up everyone welcome to the surfside ppc youtube channel today i'm going to go over google ads conversion tracking now before we get started into anything i want you to keep in mind that if you're using a platform like shopify they're going to have articles like this on their help center that's based entirely around google ads conversion tracking so if you're using woocommerce you can use a plug-in like the woocommerce pixel manager this will allow you to easily set up conversion tracking on your website if you're using shopify you can follow their guide if you're using bigcommerce or any of these other large e-commerce providers you can easily set up google ads conversion tracking i would highly recommend going directly to their help pages because i'm not going to go over each individual way to track conversions for every different platform what i'm going to be showing you today is how to track an order confirmation or a lead confirmation page so when someone visits this confirmation page they're only going to get to this page if they fill out this form that i have on my website so if i were to create for example a farmhouse goals drop shipping program what i can do is make a form like this and when someone enters all their information and clicks on submit it's going to actually redirect them directly to this confirmation page so then i can use this confirmation page as a conversion so every time someone visits this page that means they filled out my form so for example if you're selling an online product maybe it's an e-book maybe it's an online course or something like that when someone visits the confirmation page after they purchase your product you can use that page as a conversion it's the same way if you're selling tickets or if you're booking travel there's always going to be that confirmation page and this page is commonly used as a conversion page so i'm going to show you today exactly how to set this up from the very beginning so if you don't have any pixels installed on your website or anything i'm going to show you how to get started with this and then how to import that conversion into your google ads account so that you can actually optimize your campaigns for conversions like mine are here so to get started what i would recommend doing is using google tag manager so go to tag manager.google.com and make sure you create a free account and when you create your free account the first thing it's going to tell you to do is install google tag manager so what you need to do is enter these two pixels this first one goes in between your header tags and the second one goes immediately after the opening body tag so if you're using wordpress what you want to do is use a plugin like head footer and post injections and then all you need to do is go into your plugin page so you can see this is the head footer and post injections page and take the initial pixel at the very top so this first one here you want to copy it and just come into that plug-in and paste it right there now next what you want to do is after the opening body tag you want to come back over to google tag manager copy the second piece of code and enter this here for your desktop website and then enter this here for your mobile website so google tag manager will allow you to track conversions through google ads you can track every single pixel possible that you can think of whether it's a facebook pixel whether you want to set up pinterest ads conversion tracking all of that can be done through google tag manager all you need to do is enter these two pixels on your website and everything else is managed directly through your tag manager account so once you finish doing that the next thing you want to do is install google analytics for and you can also install universal google analytics so the previous version of google analytics before they released ga4 so you can install both of those completely free using google tag manager all you need to do is create your analytics account so go to analytics.google.com just keep in mind in order to do this conversion tracking you will need free accounts with google ads google tag manager and google analytics now if this is all completely brand new to you i'm going to try to make this as easy as possible so that you can track that confirmation conversion page on your website so what we're going to do next is we're going to come back over to google tag manager and you want to click on new tag here at the top left or you can click on tags over here on the left hand side as well so if we click on new tag you can name your tag at the top so what you would do is for example google analytics 4 tag configuration what you're going to see is they have a ton of feature tags at the top here and if we scroll down you can see all of the different tags that you can use with google tag manager and as long as you install this once and you install it correctly you never have to worry about it again so go that's the benefit of using google tag manager as you can see here ga4 configuration so if you click through this it's going to ask for your measurement id you can get that directly from your google analytics 4 account so if we come down here to admin and once that loads you want to click on setup assistant it's going to be the first link under property and then you're going to see tag installation here and what you want to do is click on this arrow and from there you can click on your data stream and that's going to give you your measurement id at the top here so you would just copy that measurement id come back over here to google tag manager you want to paste the measurement id here and then you can see it's going to say send a page view event when this configuration loads and then you don't really need to change anything else all you need to do is come to triggering and choose all pages so just set it up as a measurement id and all pages click on save and then from there you're going to see we have one workspace change so then all you need to do is submit this change so in order to publish your google tag manager workspace you always need to submit those changes even when you initially install google tag manager you need to submit this change here and then you enter your version name here so i could do installed ga4 and we could just do that right here because i don't not really too much difference here so we click on publish okay so what that's going to do is install the google analytics for tag onto our website so we can come back over to our workspace here and the other thing we can do is install a new tag again and for this one we're just going to do google analytics go to tag configuration we're going to do universal analytics and what it's going to do it's going to say track type so we're going to keep this as page view and then it's going to say google analytics settings and what we can do is choose a variable here so you can see i've already created this variable but what you want to do is click on new variable and then it's going to ask for your tracking id and this is going to be our google analytics settings so we'll name this variable ga settings and we want to click on the variable configuration here and just enter our tracking id so they actually have a guide here how to find your tracking id in case you have any issues with it but if we come over to our google analytics account and we come over here and we click on property settings you can see our tracking id right here so i can copy this tracking id come back over to google tag manager paste it here and click on save so that's going to be a new variable you can see that variable is ga settings and now we can just click on triggering choose again all pages so basically what we're telling google tag manager is we want you to place this google analytics tag on every single page and we want you to track every single page view that's happening on our website so then we can click on save and from there you can see we have two workspace changes at the bottom here so we created a variable so that variable has our google analytics settings and we've created a tag and that is our new google universal analytics tag so we can click on submit here now keep in mind you don't need to install universal google analytics if you are using google analytics for so you can skip this step if you want to i'm going to show you how to create conversions using universal google analytics and google analytics for so we come back over to tag manager again we just have installed google analytics tag and we'll click on publish okay so now we're ready to get started with google ads conversion tracking so what we want to do is there's different ways to set up conversion tracking on our website so if we go to tools and settings here and under measurement you're gonna see conversions so we're gonna go to our conversions page and i already have some conversions here so if you come to your page and don't have any conversion actions it's going to give you the option to add new conversion actions and what you can do is choose website conversions app conversions which i'm not going to go over in this video phone call conversions which i'm not going to go over in this video and you can import conversions from google analytics so the first thing i want to show you is how to import conversions directly from google analytics so the way to do that is to first come over here to google tag manager again we're going to come back to our workspace and what we're going to do is we're going to create a new tag so in this new tag we're going to click on tag configuration and one of the options here is a ga4 event so we can use specific google analytics for events as our conversions so we're going to choose an event here we have our configuration tag so what you want to do is choose so i you can see i have two different tags here for google analytics for i'm going to go back and delete my the new tag that i just created in this video because you don't need to enter that twice so that i'm going to use ga4 google analytics we're going to name our event so in this case what i'm going to name my event is confirmation gtm so basically confirmation underscore google tag manager and then what we're going to do is we're going to set a trigger so we don't need to do anything else here for event parameters user properties or advanced settings so we're going to click on triggering and what we want to do is we want to choose this confirmation trigger so basically when the page url contains confirmation so since we haven't created that yet in this actual video what we want to do is come over here and click on the plus sign so we can create a new trigger so what we can do is click on trigger configuration here and what we're doing is we're choosing a trigger to actually track every time that this event happens so the event that we want to track is every time there is a page view we're going to choose some page views and when the page url contains and what you want to do is enter the end of your page url here so for in this case it's going to be confirmation so we're going to be tracking every time someone visits our confirmation page on farmhousegoals.com and that trigger is going to send an event back to google analytics for so once we have page url contains confirmation we need to name our trigger and then what we can do is click on save and then we just need to name our tag at the top here so we're sending an event to our google analytics 4 every time someone visits our confirmation page so we're going to come over here and name our tag so we'll do confirmation page 2 and we'll click on save here and now you can see we have this tag added which is a google analytics for event and we have the trigger set up so every time someone visits our confirmation page it's going to record that event in our google analytics for account so now we're going to do is we're going to click on submit here so we want to enter a new version name so we have confirmation page event and we'll just do the same thing here and we'll publish this okay so that's the first step that we need to do now the next thing that we need to do is come over to our google analytics for account and what we're going to do is we're going to create a new conversion event and all you need to do is name your event and you can see i've already named it here so confirmation gtm we're going to name it the exact same thing that we created the event for in google tag manager so in google tag manager we name this event confirmation underscore gtm so you can see right here i have confirmation underscore gtm so all you need to do is name that so enter it here make sure we have the right one selected here and we click on save so i obviously already have that one here so i'm going to get rid of this one that i just created so we have confirmation gtm as a conversion now so now what we can do is come over here to our google ads account and again we're on the conversions page so we went to tools and settings we went to measurement we went to conversions and we went to create a new conversion action so from there what we want to do is import our conversion from our google analytics 4 property now keep in mind you do need to link your google analytics for account to your google ads account so if you haven't done that already go to tools and settings we're going to come down here to setup and we're going to go to linked accounts and then what you want to do here is you can see i have google analytics for and firebase one linked account so you want to go to if you don't have it linked already you're going to have a link here that says details so you're going to click on that details link in my case when you click on details since i've created these accounts and through the exact same email address it should pull up that account right there and all you need to do is click on the link button that they're going to have through the linked accounts option so once you do that your accounts are going to be completely linked and you can also double check this by going to your google analytics for account going to admin under property here when you scroll down you're going to see google ads links and you can make sure that you have your account linked here as well so you can search individual accounts and link them just like that if you have these created through the same exact email address so the same google account they should come up here automatically and they're very easy to link that way otherwise just search for the account and you can also look for your account id through google ads to make sure you have a link to your google analytics 4 account and your google ads account so once you've done that we come back over here to tools and settings we go to measurement and we go to conversions so we're going to create a new conversion action we're going to import our conversion from our google analytics for properties we're going to choose web here and we're going to click on continue so you can see here i have three different events that i haven't imported yet so confirmation gtm generate lead and purchase generate lead is actually the same thing as confirmation gtm i'm going to show you how i set that up in a second but for right now what we want to do is click on this analytics event and click on import and continue and now you can see it says you've imported one web conversion action from google analytics 4 so basically now every time someone visits the this confirmation page we have this completely tracked through our google analytics four account we have it all set up through google tag manager and we're able to actually track this conversion in google ads so we can click on done here and what we can do is we can click on this individual conversion action and we can actually click on edit settings here so you can choose different settings so at the very top is the conversion name i'm just going to leave this as is if we go to goal and action optimization so you can do select a goal category for this action so for this one it's actually considered a submit lead form so i would do submit lead form here and i would choose primary action used for bidding optimization and click on save so next is the value so this is an important one here so if you're selling a course for example and let's just say that course is 300 then what you want to do is choose use the same value for each conversion and you're going to say every single conversion action is worth 300 so then when you actually drive conversions through google ads you can keep track of your actual revenue from that conversion if it's just someone filling out a lead form then what you want to do is you could use the value from the google analytics 4 property and then enter a default value of one or you could also just use the same value for each conversion and just use it as one as well so that's what i'm gonna do in my case and basically it's gonna enter it as one us dollar every single time but essentially it's just saying this is one unique conversion so that's the value that we're going to use for this conversion so we're going to click on save okay so our source is google analytics 4 platform is our website so it'll it will track for desktop tablet or mobile devices the ga4 event is called confirmation gtm our ga4 property name farmhouse goals ga4 now count you can either choose to count every single conversion or you could just do one so if somebody goes and fills out my form twice and ends up landing on this confirmation form twice i only want to count that as one conversion because if it's the same company that's trying to become a drop shipper with farmhouse goals it doesn't really make sense to track multiple conversions when the same person is filling it out so i would recommend for a lead to discount one if it's a purchase you want to count every so we're going to just do one here now a couple things a little bit more advanced so click through conversion window so conversions can happen days after a person interacts with your ad select the maximum time after an ad interaction that you want to count conversions so let's just say someone clicked on my ad 89 days ago i can choose 90 days here and then it's going to count that as a conversion because they converted within that 90 day period so i would usually keep this at 30 days you can put it all the way up to 90 days if you really want to focus it down as short of a time period as possible you could do one week i'm just going to leave mine at 30 days and click on save and then last but not least is going to be this attribution model here so there's different attribution models that you can choose from last click is going to give all the conversion credit to the very last clicked advertisement now one you can choose is time decay so basically clicks that happen closer in time to the conversion so in the case somebody clicks on a display ad or somebody clicks on one of your video advertisements and then they go back to google they continue doing some research they click on a search ad and then they actually convert from that search ad time decay would actually give credit to different clicks throughout that path first click would give credit to the very first clicked ad that drove the conversion linear gives equal credit for every single click a lot that led to a conversion from every single advertisement and then position based gives forty percent credit to the first and last click and then twenty percent among other clicks in this case i'm just going to use last click i have used time decay in the past and i've actually used linear as well i usually don't use first click and i don't use position based very very often either so we're just going to choose last click here so we're going to give all the credit to the last clicked advertisement and we're going to click on save and now we can click on done and we have this conversion created in our account and we're ready to optimize for it when we build our campaigns so if you create a new campaign for example and let's just say i want to create a new search campaign we're going to choose leads here as our objective so what you're going to see here is it's going to say use these conversion goals to improve leads so one of the options here is purchases so that is actually the main conversion that i optimize for but in this case let's just say i want to remove that as a goal and then the other one over here is going to be outbound clicks so we can remove that one as a goal as well because my conversion action is actually a submit lead form so if we come over to my conversion actions you can see under submit lead forms this is the new one we just created so farmhouse goals confirm confirmation underscore gtm so what we want to do is just choose submit lead forms as our goal and if you scroll over conversion actions here it's going to show it as inactive because we haven't driven an active conversion from it yet but you can see here i have this giveaway thank you page so that no recent conversions for that that's not something i'm actually working on i use that for a previous example but you can see the new one we have here farmhouse goals ga4 confirmation gtm so now we are ready to optimize for this goal all we need to do is click on continue and our campaign is going to be focused on people actually filling out this lead form and being redirected to our confirmation page so at this point you would be all set with your conversion tracking that is one way to set up conversion tracking using google tag manager using google analytics for and using our google ads account now the next thing that we can do is just use google analytics for so let's just say you don't want to use google tag manager you've already installed google analytics for on your website so what you can do is if you come over here to configure you can create your own events directly through your google analytics for account and you can also use some of their existing events here as conversions as well so let's just say for example every time someone scrolls a certain distance down the page i want to count that as a conversion you could do that if you want if i want to do every time someone actually searches something on my website i can mark that as a conversion but what we can do is create an event so you can see i've already created this generate lead event here so if we just click on it you can see it's going to say custom event name if we click here it gives us all these different options in this case i'm choosing generate lead as the custom event name and then you can see matching conditions so for mine it's page title equals i did ignore case so basically it doesn't matter if it's capitalized or not and the value is confirmation i could also just do contains ignore case value confirmation and you can see here my page title for this page is just confirmation if we scroll over the top here you can see confirmation and then just my url so if we come back over to our google analytics four account basically what we're saying is we want to and i'm going to do discard changes for right now let's say i i'm creating a new event goal so basically my custom event name here is going to be generate lead event name equals so we're going to change this to page title so page title and we could do contains ignore case and just do value is confirmation so what that's going to do is and we're going to choose copy parameters from the source event you can add multiple conditions if you want and then all you need to do is click on create that's going to create that event so we're going to discard changes for now since i've already created it that's going to create this event so it the event name is going to be generate lead every time someone visits that confirmation page we want to count that as an event it's basically the same thing we did in google tag manager except we're doing it directly through our ga4 account so we're going to click on the x here and the next thing that you need to do is go to conversions and you need to just create a conversion with that same exact event name so we're going to do new conversion event here and you would just use generate lead so new conversion event generate lead click on save so once you do that it's going to create that as a new conversion event and then all we need to do again is come back over to our google ads account go to tools and settings come down here to measurement so we click on the drop down arrow click on conversions again and then again do new conversion action import from google analytics 4 click on web here and then click on continue and then we have generate lead we're going to click on this one and import and continue now generate lead is the exact same conversion as our confirmation gtm it's just a different way for it to actually be counted now the one thing you're going to see down here is this can is going to be considered a page view goal for right now so we can edit this goal and we can change the type of goal that it is but it doesn't really make a difference it's going to count them the same exact way the only reason my numbers here are different for these conversion events is i set up this confirmation gtm part of the way through the day yesterday and then i set up generate lead several days ago so it's actually counting more conversions only because i set this one up further on in the day and i kept refreshing this confirmation page so that i would actually get conversions to come in through my google analytics 4 account now the next way to do conversion tracking is going to be using google tag manager and your google ads account so we're going to start in our google ads account and we're going to come to our conversions page so again go to tools and settings under measurement you're going to find conversions and what we want to do is we're going to click to create a new conversion action and we're going to choose website here and now we want to do is create a conversion action for our website and we'll get a tracking code at the end after we create this conversion so we're going to start with the goal category for this action and in this case it's going to be to submit lead form so we're going to do submit lead form here and we're going to choose this as a primary action used for bidding optimization we're going to scroll down so we'll do submit lead form and we'll do example now value what we're going to do is use the same value for each conversion and every conversion is going to be counted as 1. we're going to scroll down so for count we're only going to count one because that's recommended for leads and sign up so only the first interaction is valuable it doesn't really make sense to count if someone fills out my lead form 10 different times as 10 different conversions because if it's the same person filling it out it's really just one lead now we scroll down here there's a few different options for the click through conversion window you can extend this the engaged view conversion window you can extend extend all of these here and you can update your attribution model i'm not going to be doing that in this case i'm just going to click on create and continue and now we've created a conversion action so we need to set up the tag to add to my website so since i've i'm already using google tag manager what i can do is just choose use google tag manager here there's also install the tag yourself so you can add the tag directly to your website code since we installed google tag manager it makes much more sense to use that now the other option here is enhanced conversions so basically with this it's keeping all your data confidential but what's happening is google ads is going to take all the information that people submit through a form or if they purchase something from you and they're going to use that data to make sure you have more accurate reporting so if someone is signed into their gmail account and they enter that email here as they go through and submit my drop shipping form if google ads is unable to track that conversion in any other way enhanced conversion tracking basically means that they'll be able to track that person and what we can do is choose google tag manager here so i'm not going to go over that in this video this is a little bit more advanced and it's fairly new so i'm going to create a separate video about enhanced conversions but what we want to do is i want to use google tag manager here and the first thing that we're going to need to do is use google tag manager to install our google ads conversion tracking tag and then you're going to see we need to use this conversion id and this conversion label and we're also going to need to make sure that we add a conversion linker tag and configure it to fire on every single one of our pages if you're using accelerated mobile pages you're going to need a separate container i'm not going to be showing that in this video so what we're going to be doing is we're going to come over to google tag manager and we're going to create a new tag so with this new tag we're going to click on tag configuration and one of the options is google ads conversion tracking now this is where that conversion id and the label is going to come in handy so we're going to come back over here and we're going to copy our id and we're going to paste it here you're going to see conversion linker tag missing in container if you haven't created it yet i'm going to create that after this step so we're going to take our conversion label we're going to copy that and we're going to paste that here so now we have our tag configured you don't need anything else down here at this time so what we're going to do is we're going to click on triggering and we're going to choose the confirmation trigger that we did earlier so page url contains confirmation so it's the same exact trigger we're essentially just using google ads instead of our google analytics 4 account to track this conversion so we're not setting up a google analytics for event we're just setting up that conversion directly through our google ads account the benefit of using google analytics 4 is that you can actually track that conversion in your account for google analytics for and you're getting accurate data in google ads as well in this case you're just having that data in google ads so you're not tracking that as a conversion in your google analytics 4 account if you use this method so what we're going to do is let's just say we want to create a new trigger so it's going to be the same exact thing we did before so a page view we're going to do some page views when that page url contains and we're going to do confirmation again here and we'll name this confirmation trigger three at this point so now we have this trigger for every time someone visits our confirmation page so we're gonna click on save and now we need to name this tag so we'll come to the top okay so we have this tag created we have our trigger created for every time someone visits our confirmation page so we're going to click on save and now we have to make sure that we do is click to add a new tag again and we're going to click on tag configuration and you're going to see a little further down the list conversion linker you can also search for it so you could search for all these tags very easily too so we're gonna do conversion linker and then all we need to do is trigger this on all pages so basically it just allows google ads to track our traffic much better and they can track where conversions are coming from so they know when someone clicks on an advertisement whether or not that led to that conversion so it just basically gives google ads more data so we're just choosing tag type conversion linker on all pages so we can just name this conversion linker tag and we can click on save and now all we have to do in this click case is submit this version through google tag manager and we'll click on publish and now we have our confirmation google ads tag added we have the conversion linker tag added and we have our confirmation trigger three so if we come back over here what we can do is we followed all of our instructions we'll click on next so now that we've set up the tag you're gonna see here for conversion tracking to work you'll need to add the global site tag and event snippet to your website so since we're already using google tag manager on our website we don't need to make any changes we're all ready to go with conversion tracking so this will properly track our con confirmation page so we can count that as a conversion in our google ads account now the last way to set up our google ads conversion tracking is if you have are using universal google analytics and let's just say you want to make sure your google ads account is linked to your google analytics account so you can see here if we click on new link group you can go through the process of linking your accounts this is my google ads account it's linked you could see to my universal analytics account and then you can also come over here go to tools and settings again go to setup go to linked accounts and it's going to be the same way that we did the other one you want to click on details for google analytics ua and then from there if we just click on manage and link right here you can see i have four goals 10 audience lists and you're just going to get an option you can just click on the link that says to link those accounts and then you're going to be all linked and you're going to be able to easily track everything that's happening from your google ads accounts so what we're going to do now is come back over to universal analytics this is actually the easiest one to set up conversions because all we need to do is come over to our admin page here we need to click on goals we're going to create a new goal here under goal setup all we're going to do is come down here to custom we're going to click on continue we're going to do destination and we're going to name this goal so we'll do confirmation page you're going to see it's going to give us goal id 10 goal set 2 so we click on continue and then all we need to do is destination equals 2 and just enter confirmation here so just basically the page url where people are going we don't need the first part of it the farmhousegoals.com but we just need to do confirmation here we can set a value for this so if every thing is worth 300 you can set a value otherwise just turn off and it will just count each individual visit to the confirmation page we can verify this goal so see how often it would have converted from the past seven days so with 0.24 conversion rate click on save and then what we're going to do is we're going to come back over here to google ads we're going to click on tools and settings again we're going to go to measurement and conversions and we're again going to do a new conversion action and we're going to import this one from google analytics ua so we're going to choose that here click on continue and you can see here we have the confirmation page goal so we click on it import and continue and now we're ready to optimize for this goal again in our google ads account so this is the way to create conversions for specific confirmation pages on your website so if you're able to actually track every time someone submits an order or fills out a lead form this is an easy way to track all of your conversions using either google tag manager google analytics 4 or universal google analytics and then you can start optimizing for those conversions in your account so you don't want to do this three separate times because it doesn't make sense to actually track the same thing three different ways so just choose the way that works the best for your business and then all you need to do is just find that one conversion make sure your data matches what you're seeing in google analytics and what you're seeing in google ads because as you can see here i have a count here for these different conversions so if your account is way higher than the actual amount of leads that are being submitted then i would double check the way you've configured this event that you've created just to make sure that you're tracking everything properly also you want to make sure that people are only landing on these confirmation pages after they fill something out and submit it to you or after they purchase something so once you have that all set up you're able to start optimizing for these conversions with your google ads account you absolutely want to use conversion tracking to get the most out of every single google ads campaign that you run so again if you have any questions about this please leave them in the comments section thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the surfside ppc youtube channel