What is conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking is the monitoring of conversions. Conversions are what we call user actions that bring your company closer to meeting a predefined goal. These actions can include making a purchase, adding something to cart, opening emails, clicking links on landing pages, etc. Metrics show how well your marketing company's efforts, whether it's email marketing or social media advertising, are achieving the desired result with the target audience.
Conversion tracking works by putting numbers to the results of your marketing campaigns. By tracking conversions, you'll learn how many people in your audience are contacting your company, subscribing to your mailing list, or buying your products. Conversion tracking is most commonly used in advertising and email marketing campaigns, although you can apply it to any campaign that includes clickable links that direct your audience to a desired end goal.
What is a conversion?
A conversion occurs when a member of your target audience takes the action you were aiming for with your current advertising efforts. By this definition, a conversion is not always a sale; it can be a mere click on an ad, long before the person who clicked actually decides to purchase what they chose to research. It all depends on your aspiration and your campaign settings.
How to track conversions on the Google Ads platform
Conversion tracking
What is conversion tracking? Conversion tracking is the practice of keeping track of all completed conversion actions you've assigned to your account, and which ads are responsible for them.
Attribution modeling
Attribution modeling is a must-have conversion tracking setup that affects the reporting and performance of your conversions. If a user interacts with more than one of your ads (but doesn't convert) before completing the conversion action, the attribution model decides which ad should be the cause of the conversion. For example, first-click attribution gives all the credit to the first ad the user interacted with, while linear attribution gives each ad a portion of the credit. You can learn more in our guide to attribution models.
Conversion value
Conversion value is an option in some conversion actions that allows you to specify a specific value against an action. For example, a business might know that filling out forms on a page results in $5,000 worth of work versus $500 worth of work, so that value would be applied to the conversion action on that page. This can affect your account bidding strategies, such as maximizing conversion value.
Google tag
A Google tag is a code that you add to your website. It acts as a "middleman" between your website and your Google Ads account. The point of the Google tag is to set new cookies on your domain that store information about a user's actions on your site after they click on your ad. This is what allows your website to accurately signal actions back to your Google Ads account.
What conversions we can track in Google Ads
Google defines five main conversion action types that you can choose from when setting up conversion tracking in your account:
- Website Actions
These are the most basic or well-known conversion types in Google Ads. A website action can be a purchase, form fill, button click, etc.
- Phone calls
This type of conversion is also very popular as it is simply a call to your business that comes from your Google Ads.
- Application installation
These only apply to businesses that advertise an app. Their purpose is to account for app downloads or other interactions within the app.
- Local actions
Whenever someone performs an action specific to the advertiser's physical location during or after interacting with the ad, it's considered a local conversion action. These are automatically determined for you by Google Ads as they only take place within Google products or services, such as Google Maps. Some examples of local actions are clicks to call, view a menu, or get directions.
Conversion tracking - what categories are there?
You will also need to select a conversion category for your conversion actions. The point of this is to make it easier to segment your PPC reports later by separating the data by category. There are over 12 conversion categories in Google Ads, but Google breaks them down into three types:
- Sales
Making a purchase, adding an item to the cart, initiating a payment, or subscribing to a recurring service are examples of sales categories.
- Leeds
These include other website actions as well as local actions such as submitting a lead form, booking an appointment, requesting a quote, calling your business or getting directions.
- Other
There are other categories you can choose for unique Google Ads conversion tracking situations, such as pageviews.
What are the pros of tracking conversions correctly?
Here are a few reasons to track conversions:
- Maximize your return on investment (ROI)
Conversion tracking can show if you're seeing adequate ROI, also known as return on ad spend (ROAS), for your ad campaigns.
- Allocate your budget
ROI and ROAS can be used to determine your budget structure. Let's say you spent more money on social media advertising than email marketing, but tracking your conversions shows a higher ROI on the latter. In this case, don't just spend more on email marketing, transfer money from your social media advertising budget to your email marketing budget.
- Identify opportunities for improvement
If you notice that certain campaign approaches aren't driving as good conversions as others, you can compare those campaigns to more successful ones to identify potential areas for change. For example, if you see that several campaigns targeting one keyword convert more than campaigns targeting another, you'll know you need to focus on the higher performing keyword.
- Distinguish clicks from conversions
Clicks and conversions aren't always synonymous. In fact, sometimes a high number of clicks can hide a low number of conversions. By tracking conversions, you can determine the relationship between the number of clicks and achieving the desired conversion.