You’re paying top dollars to Google to make sure your ads are shown to potential customers who’re searching for your target keywords. So how one should track the return on that investment? That’s correct, using Conversion Tracking.
Configuring conversions on Google Ads allows Google to automatically track the goals you define as conversion. A conversion can be a sign up, a button click, a purchase, or any other goal you’ll define as beneficial for your business.
I would argue that tracking conversions is the first thing you should configure, before even creating your ads. It’s what defines the expectations you have from your ads, so that both you and Google will be aligned on that goal.
How to start tracking conversions on Google Ads
- Navigate to your Google Ads account.
- On the top menu bar, click on Tools & Settings and choose Conversions.
- Click the blue Plus button, and choose the type of conversion you’d like to track. The available types are: Website (tracking online sales, link clicks, page views, sign-ups), App (track App installs, in-app purchases, in-app actions), Phone calls (track calls from ads, calls to a number on your website, clicks on a number on mobile sites).
- Once you selected the type of conversion, you’ll be prompted to name it, and assign a value for each conversion. For example, if your average sale price is $50, you can set that value as the conversion value for purchase conversions.
- Now all you have to do is implement the code based on Google’s instructions and you’re all set.
Tracking multiple conversion types on Google Ads
Tracking multiple conversion types can help to better understand the users’ journey in your system. For example, if you’re running a SaaS business, you probably want to know how many users signed up for a free trial, and how many purchased. Those are two different metrics, and therefore two different conversion types.
Google allows you to track multiple conversion types for each of your keywords and ads on Google Ads. All you have to do it create multiple conversion types, and integrate the relevant code to trigger that conversion whenever the event happened. So on each user signup, you trigger that conversion, and for each purchase, you trigger a purchase conversion.
Once conversions are set up, you can navigate to Google Ads dashboard, to the Keywords box. There, you can click one of the top metrics, for example “CTR”, and choose Conversions instead.
When you choose Conversions, you’ll be able to choose which type of Conversion you’d like to track and get a metric for. So you can choose Purchase if you’d like to see how many purchases were initiated as a result of advertising for that specific keyword, or “Sign-up” if you’re looking to understand how many free trials were started as a result of clicking a specific ad or a specific keyword-related ad.
