Google Ads Conversion Tracking: 2020 Easy Free Tutorial

Published by Algorithmic Global on

Google Ads Conversion Tracking

A simple guide to setting up your Google Ads conversion tracking.

In our last post, we created a simple free guide to understand Google Ads’ bidding strategies. There is one significant factor that many advertisers need to learn before implementing an automated bidding strategy, and its to set up and enable conversion tracking within their Google Ads account. 

It is also beneficial to set up and enable conversion tracking so that you can:

  • Measure your conversions
  • Optimize your website for conversions

You can’t track conversions accurately on Google Ads without installing their conversion tracking code on your site. Fortunately, this is easy to do, and we’ll show you how with a few simple steps. 

Google Ads conversion tracking pixel is a small snippet of code that you’ll install on the pages of your website. This pixel code will fire when users click on an Ad and then visit individual pages to trigger the conversion tracker.

If you want to track sales, you will place a specific snippet of the code on the “Thank You” page of your website, which users will only see if they’ve made a purchase. Similarly, if you want to track email sign-ups, you’d place trackable codes on the confirmation pages for those actions.

How to Set Up Google Ad’s Conversion Tracking

Getting the Google Ads conversion tracking pixel up and running on your site will require two different steps: creating the conversion tracking pixel and installing it.

Creating a Google Ads Conversion Tracking Pixel

Step #1: Log in to your Google Ads account and then navigate to the Tools and Setting button. Choose “Conversions,” found under the Measurement section.

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2020 Google Ads Platform: Choose “Conversions,” found under the Measurement section.

Step #2: Click on the blue (+) sign to create a new conversion.

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Click the blue (+) to start a new conversion

Step #3: Determine which of the four conversions you want to track. For this example, we’ll track a form submission from the “Contact Us” page from a website.

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Select the conversion you want to track
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Website conversions include form submissions, sign-ups, page views, and more

Step #4: Next, name your conversion and choose the category your conversion falls under. For a “Contact Us” form submission, choose “Contact” under the leads categories.

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There are many categories to choose from (sales, leads, or other)
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Name the conversion name “Contact Us Form”

Step# 5: Set a value for your conversion, you can choose to enter the same amount for each conversion or use different values for each conversion to track the ROI of your campaigns automatically. For this example, we are not going to set a value for this conversion. Learn more about conversion values here.

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Example of selecting a value for your conversion

Step# 6: Select how many conversions to count per click or interaction. You can either count multiple conversions from a single click as just one or as multiples.

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In this example we are counting every conversion/click

Step #7:  Pick your conversion window so your AdWords can receive proper attribution. There are multiple attribution models you can choose from, which you can read about here. The final step is installing the actual code to your site.

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Conversion Windows
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Click Through Conversion Window
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View Through Conversion Windows
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Attribution Models

How to Install the Conversion Tracking Pixel

You are provided with three options to set up the tag to add to your website. 

  1. Install the tag yourself
  2. Email the tag to your webmaster
  3. Install the tag using Google Tag Manager
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How To Set Up Conversion Tracking

When you’re ready to install your AdWords conversion tracking pixel, you’ll see two things. One will be your global snippet, which you can place on all pages of your site, and underneath this, you’ll see the event code.

The event code is the snippet that tracks explicitly different types of conversions to report back to you in detail. The event snippet is placed after the global site tag on the specific pages between the <head>/<head> tags where you want to install the event code.

We hope these tips were helpful, please look out for our next post as we finally cover Free 2020 Guide To Google Ads Bidding Strategies (Part 2).


1 Comment

Free 2020 Guide To Google Ads Bidding Strategies (Part 2) - · June 24, 2020 at 10:43 pm

[…] If you don’t have conversion tracking set up, we created a simple tutorial in our last post to get you […]

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