To follow this SOP, you will need to have Google Tag Manager (GTM) installed on your site. If you haven’t done so and you are using WordPress, you can follow SOP 004 (web version). You will also need a Google Ads account. If you don’t have one yet, you can follow SOP 014 (web version).
Creating your conversion in the new Google Ads interface
Log into your Google Ads account at https://ads.google.com
Note: Ensure your account already uses the new Google Ads interface. If your interface looks different from the one shown in this SOP, you might be using the classic interface. If that is the case, you should see a button prompting you to try the new interface, you just need to click it.
Go to Goals > Measurement > + Create conversion action.
Select the action you want to track:
- Website
- App
- Phone calls
- Import
[Recommended] Click the “Website” option.
Enter the URL for the website you want to measure your conversions. Click “Scan”.
Once successfully scanned, you will have the option to create conversion actions manually using code. Click “+ Add a conversion action manually”.
Inside the “Conversion action details” panel, you will need to select the goal category when creating a conversion action for your website:
Goal and action optimization: Select the category that best fits your conversion, this will not affect your tracking or the delivery of your ads. Instead, it will allow you to segment your conversions on your reports to analyze similar conversions together. The dropdown option will reveal 3 subcategories:
Sales subcategories – All your purchase conversions are under this category:
- Purchase
- Add to cart
- Begin checkout
- Subscribe – like paid memberships, monthly service subscriptions etc
Lead subcategories – Any lead conversion tracking including:
- Contact
- Submit lead form
- Book appointment
- Sign-up
- Request quote
- Get directions
- Outbound click
This includes: Page view - Select this category when your conversion is a pageview of a page that is known to be tightly related to one of your key conversions (e.g., viewing the pricing page). Other - If your conversion does not fit any of the previous categories, or if you prefer to have conversions grouped under this extra category, you can do so.
Note: Feel free to choose your subcategory the way you think better suits your business, e.g.:
If your business requires a “Phone Number” to consider the conversion a lead, then “Friend Referral” could be better for the “Submit lead form” category instead.
If your sign-up process has multiple steps, you can choose to consider an “Initiated Sign Up” conversion to be inside the “Sign Up” category or a “Page view”.
Your internal reports must follow the same structure as your Google Ads account to ensure all departments speak the same language.
Conversion name: Google will auto-fill the conversion name based on what you’ve selected in “Goal and action optimization”. You’re allowed to edit the name as you see it as long as it’s short and intuitive. It should be obvious to you or anyone what this is about since the conversion name will appear on your reports.
Value: This field is optional but recommended. If you can estimate how much this conversion is worth, you should enter it here.
Example: If you are not sure how much a conversion is worth to you since it is not a purchase, you can estimate it by:
If your lead-to-customer conversion rate is 15% and each customer is worth $100 to you, this means that every lead is worth about $15. (Conversion Rate x Purchase Value) If you are running a subscription business or your funnel includes multiple products or services, the “Purchase Value” should be your Average Customer Lifetime Value.
Count:
Every:Select this option if you would like this conversion to be counted every time it happens after an ad interaction. Usually, you will only want to select this option if the conversion adds value to your business even if performed by the same visitor multiple times. (e.g, a purchase or booking an appointment for different times) One: Select this option if you want this conversion fired once per ad click. (e.g, If you have 2 contact forms with the same objective on your website and some users for some reason, you can submit both)
Clickthrough conversion window: Here, you can configure the period after a visitor clicks on your ad, during which you can consider a conversion to have been attributed to your Google Ads campaign.
Note: If a conversion happens outside your selected conversion window, it will not be reported in Google Ads.
To best select the conversion window, you should look at your customer behavior and understand how long your buyer’s journey takes.
Examples:
If you’re running a SaaS platform and promoting a 14-day trial, you might want your conversion window to be bigger than 14 days. Otherwise, some sales might not be recorded in Google Ads. If you’re running an abandoned cart remarketing Facebook Ad campaign 10 days after the user has left the website, you might not want these conversions being reported on your Google Ads reports and might want to set the conversion window to 9 days instead. You might want to set up similar conversion windows across all your ad platforms (e.g. Facebook Ads) to make it easier to compare results.
Engaged-view conversion window: This allows you to select how long to track conversions after a video engagement. The engagement conversion window is the period after a person watches 10 seconds or more of your video ad. For example, if you set your engagement conversion window to 3 days, any conversion that happens more than 3 days after a person watches 10 seconds or more of your video ad won't be counted.
View-through conversion window: This works the same way as the “Click-through conversion window” field but applies to view-through conversions (conversions that happened after a visitor viewed but didn’t click an ad for your website).
Usually, you will want to set this window to a lower value than the one you’ve selected for your “Click-through conversion window”. Otherwise, you might end up with a lot of view-through conversions that are not necessarily attributed to the visitor viewing your ad.
Attribution Model:
Depending on your advertising strategy, a user might interact with multiple ads before actually performing the intended action. Use this option to define how much credit you want to attribute to each interaction.
In most cases, you will want to select “Last click” to ensure that all the credit is given to the last ad the user interacted with. This means that if the user has previously interacted with another ad, that ad will not be reporting any conversion even though, in some way, it might have aided the conversion.
As of July 2023, other older options to distribute this credit throughout the conversion path are no longer available such as
- First click
- Linear
- Time decay
- Position-based
If you are unsure, select “Data-driven” as recommended by Google. Whenever possible, "Data-driven" uses your account's conversion data to calculate the actual contribution of each ad interaction across the conversion path.
Example:
You have a restaurant named Ristorante Abigaille in Florence, Italy. A customer finds your restaurant by clicking on ads after searching for "restaurant Tuscany", "restaurant Florence", "3-star restaurant Florence", and finally "3-star restaurant Abigaille Florence." She books a table after clicking on an ad that came up with "3-star restaurant Abigaille Florence".
In the "Last click" model, the last search term, "3-star restaurant Abigaille Florence," gets all the credit for the booking. But in the "Data-driven" model, credit is divided among all the search terms based on how much they helped in getting the booking.
Finally, click “Done”.
To proceed, click "Save and continue".
You will then reach the “Tag Setup” panel, where you are given 3 choices:
- Set up with a Google tag
- Email instructions to your webmaster
- Use Google Tag Manager
For this SOP, we will choose "Use Google Tag Manager". Take note of your “Conversion ID” and “Conversion labels” for the milestone, "Setting up your conversion tag in Google Tag Manager", in this SOP.
Setting up your conversion trigger in Google Tag Manager
Go to tagmanager.google.com and select the account you want to work on.
You will now need to define what kind of action you want to track. This SOP covers two of the most popular tracking needs:
- Page View: If a “Thank You” page follows your conversion or if your conversion is a view of an important page (e.g. pricing page), select Page View.
- Form Submission: If your conversion requires a user to submit a form as a lead or as a subscriber, select Form Submission.
Tracking a Page View
Under “Triggers”, click on the “New” button:
Rename your Trigger and then click “Choose a trigger type to begin setup..." and select “Page View”:
Note: When naming your trigger, it is recommended that you define your naming convention. It should be clear and fast to guess what each trigger is doing based solely on its name. For this SOP, we will use “Conversion_ThankYou_FriendReferral” since this trigger will be used to track conversion of a thank you page for referring a friend to get a $20 coupon.
Under the trigger firing rule, select “All Page Views”. This is recommended for most cases unless you only want to track specific pages, which you then select “Some Page Views”. This option will only fire when the Page URL contains a certain word (e.g. products).
Click the blue “Save” button to save your trigger.
The next steps correspond to setting up a “Click” event. Skip to the “Setting up your conversion tag in Google Tag Manager” section of this SOP.
Tracking a Form Submission
Under “Triggers”, click on the “New” button:
Rename your trigger, click “Choose a trigger type to begin setup..." and then select “Form Submission”:
Next, check “Check Validation” and select "All Forms". This will ensure this tag will only fire if the form has successfully been submitted.
Under the trigger firing rule, select “Page URL”. This tells Google Tag Manager to fire this tag on a certain page. You can then specify which URL to fire this tag. In this example, it is set to fire when the user is on the sign-up page.
Click the blue “Save” button to save your trigger.
Setting up your conversion tag in Google Tag Manager
On the sidebar, click “Tags” and then “New”:
Rename your tag:
Note: When creating new tags, it’s recommended to define a naming convention from the beginning. This keeps your Google Tag Manager set up neatly organized and easy to maintain for many years to come. [Abbreviated Name Of Tool]_[Use for this tag] is a good start (e.g. “GAds_Conversion”).
Under “Tag Configuration”, rename the tag and then click on the tag icon.
From the dropdown list under “Featured”, select “Google Ads” followed by “Google Ads Conversion Tracking”.
You’ll be asked to create a conversion linker tag. If you haven’t created it, click “Create”.
In the conversion linker settings, rename the tag, then tick "Enable linking on all page URLs" and click “Save”. The conversion linker tags are used to help tags measure click data so that conversions are measured effectively.
Back in the conversion tag setup page, you should now see the conversion linker tag enabled.
Enter your conversion details:
Conversion ID: Insert the Conversion ID that you got from the earlier chapter of this SOP.
Conversion Label: Insert the Conversion Label that you got from the earlier chapter of this SOP.
Conversion Value: If you choose to have a conversion value, add it here. Do not include the currency symbol.
Transaction ID: Leave this empty unless you can dynamically parse an Order ID value (out of the scope of this SOP).
Currency Code: Only use this field if you have entered a conversion value. Enter the 3-letter currency code (ISO 4217) you want to use for this conversion.
Note: You can find a list of 3-letter currency codes here.
Scroll down to the “Triggering” section > Click “Choose a trigger to make this trigger fire...” > Select the trigger you have just created in the previous chapter of this SOP > Click “Save”.
If you click “Overview” on the sidebar, Google Tag Manager will display an overview of your changes. If everything looks ok, you are now ready to hit “Submit”
In the Submission Configuration panel, you will be given a chance to add a name and description to this version. After you have done so, hit “Publish”.
Note: Adding a name and description is optional but recommended. You should enter the information here to make it easy to know what changes are being made.
That’s it! You will now be taken to see the summary of the changes you have just made.
Checking if your conversion tag is firing correctly
Open your website where you've set up the conversion tag e.g. thank you page, submit your form page, add to cart button page etc.
Note: To test button clicks, it is better if you hold down the “Ctrl” (or “Cmd ⌘” key if you’re using a Mac) on your keyboard before clicking on the button that you want to track. This will ensure you will remain on the same page and, therefore, be able to see if the event was triggered.
Now go to the [NEW] Google Tag Assistant Companion Chrome extension and add it to Chrome.
Note: As of Oct 2023, Google Tag Assistant Legacy has deprecated. The new “Google Tag Assistant Companion” extension can now be used to verify and troubleshoot tagging for Google Tag (gtag.js) and Google Tag Manager installations for Google Analytics, Google Ads and more.
After adding the extension, click on the Tag Assistant Companion icon on your browser.
Click on “Add domain”
Enter your website’s URL and click “Connect”:
Check if the Tag Assistant is connected to your site. You should be able to see the below pop-up on your site when it is connected. Click “Finish”.
Note: If connection issues occur, you may refer to this link here to troubleshoot.
Next, you will directed to another page from your website browser. In the list of tags fired, look for the one corresponding to the conversion you’ve set up (in our example, “GAds_Conversions_FriendRef”).
By clicking on the tab, you will see that all settings we configured are the correct Conversion Value, Conversion ID, Conversion Label, Currency Code, and even the trigger:
Ensure your conversion is not firing when you don’t want it to be performing an unrelated non-conversion action and check if the tag has been triggered.
Note: If your conversion is a Thank You page view, head over to another unrelated page. If your conversion is a button click, try clicking on some other similar buttons on the page:
Lastly, you will want to check if the data is correctly sent to Google Ads. To do so, open your Google Ads Conversions panel by clicking here. And check the “Status” of the conversion you have just set up. Ideally, you should be seeing "No Recent Conversions" or "Recording Conversions".
Note: Sometimes, it may take up to 48 hours to see the status change from “Unverified” to one of those two.
Note 2: If you want to be sure that your tag is firing correctly, you may want to click on your ad and perform the conversion yourself as a regular visitor would. Bear in mind you will be charged for that click.
