Tracking Conversions in Google Ads

Tracking conversions in Google Ads is important if you want to know how effective your Google Ads are.  It is important in advertising and marketing to be able to determine what ads are effective and worth the advertising dollars and what are not.  You also want to know the extent to which each ad and keyword are working.

While viewing clickthrough rates can give you a sense of the reach of an ad, if you want to see how your clients actually interact with your website you should begin tracking conversions in Google Ads and Google Analytics.

You can set up whatever is important to your nonprofit as a conversion action.  For example, if you want your Google Ads account to get leads, you can have Google track each time someone who viewed an ad went to your Contact Us page and hit submit.  Google can track specific page views, but it can also integrate with scripts so a JavaScript that runs when a form is submitted can count as a conversion and be tracked. Often it will make sense to track phone calls as well.  You should set up separate conversion actions for each type of event that you want to track.  For each conversion type, you should give it a numeric value.  While this is generally not a dollar or currency value, you should use a number to as a sign of the relative value to your nonprofit of the various conversion types.

Once you are tracking conversions you can analyze metrics such as cost per conversion which can let you know how effectively your ads are at bringing people into a sales or donation funnel.  Using conversions also opens up new types of automated bidding in a Google Grants account such as Target CPA (Target Cost Per Acquisition), Target ROAS (Target Return on Ad Spend), and Maximize Conversions.

While Google Ads has some ability to track conversions, it is generally best to track conversions in Google Analytics and import those conversion events into Google Ads.  Google Analytics has more ways of parsing data and is more powerful than Google Analytics when it really comes to knowing a website’s audience which is why it is best to track data there.

Grant Republic specializes in optimizing Google Ads accounts tracking conversions and using real, quantitative data to make data-driven changes to your marketing to get better results.  Contact us today or set up a free consultation.