How To Setup Google Ads Conversion Tracking in 2026 (Full Guide)

Key Takeaways

I'm going to show you the easiest way to set up your Google Ads conversion tracking in 2025. Let's jump in. So, in our Google Ads account, what you're going to want to do first of all is go over to tools and then you're going to want to go to your data manager. Now, this is by far the easiest way to actually import in your conversion events directly from Google Analytics, which you should already have set up and tracking all of your conversion events. So, first of all, if you don't already have a Google Analytics account, then you won't be able to go ahead and connect your Google Analytics G4 account. So, if you don't already have that, then search for Google Analytics and go ahead and click on the first link and then click on get started today. And you're going to want to go ahead and follow the proceeding steps to go ahead and create your first Google Analytics property. Now, from there, once you have your Google Analytics account, you're going to want to connect that to your website. Now, the easiest way to do that is to use something like the Shopify app store or most modern website builders have a particular app store where you can install something like the Google app and that's where it's going to go ahead and automatically connect to your Google Analytics account. You just go ahead and select it and as well as your merchant center and other things like that and that's going to automatically upload all of the tracking events that you need to have for your e-commerce site. So, it's going to track things like your add to carts, your initiate checkouts, your page views, and of course, most importantly, your purchases, which is going to be your primary conversion event that you're going to optimize for. So, for example, in one of our Shopify stores, as you can see right here, we currently have the Google and YouTube app installed. And if we go over to settings right here, you will see we have our Merchant Center account connected, which uploads our product feed and allows us to run shopping ads. We have our Google Ads account connected, and we also have our Google Analytics account connected right here. So again, this applies to Wix, WordPress, Woo Commerce, Squarespace, whatever it is, they should all have a particular app or integration that allows you to connect your Google Analytics account directly to your website. And so that's going to track everything for you. Now, what you can do in your Google Analytics account is go over to admin and then go to events right here. Now, it might take a little bit to actually populate those events, but what you can do is go over to recent events right here, and you should see these events start to show up. You're going to see page view. You're going to see add to cart, begin checkout, and purchase, of course, which is the most important. Now, if you have a lead generation funnel and maybe you're looking to do a call funnel and optimize for conversions around people booking events with you and meetings with you, then what you can do is the same thing. Whatever software you use for actually getting those leads to you, whether it's Calendarly to book calls or another software to get lead form submissions, everyone should have particular integration section. And as you can see for Calendarly, for example, they do have a Google Analytics integration where you can add in your Google Analytics property to then be able to track all of the events that come through your lead generation software. And again, similarly under recent events, as you can see here, this is what we use for our agency. We go ahead and track as a key event. So we mark it as a key event right here. Invite meeting scheduled, which is the event for someone when they book a call with us. And that's what we're going to upload and import into Google Ads. And so we also have first visit, form start, page view. We also use type form. So we have type form submissions as well. And so for example, if we wanted to go ahead and import in form submit, we can go ahead and mark this as a key event. And if we go over to key events, we can now see we have these key events and these are the events that we can now import into Google Ads. So same thing on the e-commerce side. We want to import an add to cart, begin checkout, and of course purchase. And then we can go over to key events right here. We can see all those events are there. So once you have Google Analytics connect to your website, you can then go to the data manager. Go ahead and go connect product and you're going to want to select Google Analytics G4. You're going to want to go ahead and select your actual property right here. And then go next. And then what you're going to want to do is make sure you have import app and web metrics turned on. This is what allows you to import those conversion metrics in and also import Google Analytics audiences so you can retarget people that visit your website. So go ahead and click link. Awesome. So we now have our G4 event linked. All that we need to do now is go back. And by the way, if you don't see these events right away, if you just added your G4 events in, wait about 24 hours, and you should see all of these events show up, which then you can mark them as key events, and then you can import them in. So it might just take a little bit of time to actually populate. But go through your website, browse your website, and go through all these events. So like add to cart, initiate checkout, and those events will show up within a couple hours. So now what we're going to do once we have G4 connected is we're going to go to goals. We're going to go to conversions, the summary right here. And now what we're going to do is we're going to create a conversion action and we're going to go import right here using Google Analytics 4 using the web. Go continue. And now we can see we have those key events are showing up here. The link to our G4 property and then we can use those as our main conversion events. And so in this case what we can go ahead and import is our form submit and we can also add in our payment. We can go ahead and click on import and continue. And if you have a Shopify store, again, you should be seeing these metrics coming in right here. So, I recommend adding in all of these. And what we're going to be doing is only optimizing as a primary for purchase. We're going to make all these secondary so we can track them. But the only event you want to be optimizing for is the purchase. So, we're going to go ahead and import all of these as well. And boom, there we go. So, we now have purchase. And you can see we have the event right there imported in. We also have add to cart. We also have begin checkout. And then we have other events here as well. So for page view, what we want to do is go ahead and recategorize this to page view other. So I'm going to go ahead and save that. And again, right now all of these actions are primary. That means that Google is going to use them to optimize our campaigns. We only want to use the purchase event as the primary event or if you're using lead genen, the submit form or like book a call event as the primary and you want to make all the other ones just secondary. So Google only optimizes for the final event. So in this case, what we want to do is take add to cart. We're to go to edit settings. We're going to change this to secondary. Save that. Go done. And we're going to do that for all of the other events as well. All right. And so we now only have purchase as the primary optimization action. All the other ones will be shown up, but they're not going to be optimized for. And so Google's only going to use the purchase event to really understand the customers and what to really optimize around as far as audience targeting goes and keyword targeting. And so all these other events we can still track, but this is the main event that we're actually going to be using. And the great thing about Google Analytics is it's automatically going to import in the value of each conversion. So if somebody spends $200 with you, you will see that the conversion value will come in here at $200 and you will see that was like one purchase or one conversion at a value of $200. So it works out really well where this is the only setup that you need to do and that's how to best set up your conversion events. Now, if you do run into any issues setting up these conversion events, leave me a comment below letting me know. I get back to everybody personally and I'm happy to help you out. And if you're interested in Google Ads and how to actually run campaigns in the most effective way possible and how to optimize those campaigns to scale to 100K months, then subscribe to the channel. I'm posting a lot of videos about Google ads as well as Facebook ads. And if you're interested in learning more right now, I recommend you check out this video