Conversion tracking is a feature in Google Ads that keeps tabs of what meaningful actions are completed by visitors on your website or landing page. This is to help you better understand the effectiveness, as well as the return on investment, for your ad spend and marketing efforts.
But as great as it sounds, it gets complicated. You start hitting snags. Conversions fall off. Things start breaking. Next thing you know, you’re in an account with skewed conversion data and no idea if the money put towards your ads is actually making a difference in your business’s success.
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In this guide, I’m going to explain why every business needs conversion tracking (no ifs, ands, or buts!), go over conversion tracking setup and metrics, and then run through the eight most common hang-ups I see with Google Ads conversion tracking (and how to fix them, of course!). They include:
>Not knowing what to trackNo conversion data or low conversion ratesConversion data seems offNeed to remove/add a conversionConversion action unclear“No recent conversions” or “tag inactive” notificationNew landing page, old conversion tracking setupConversions just (poof!) fell off
By the end, you’ll know how to set up and troubleshoot your Google Ads conversion tracking so that the data you look at in your account is accurate every time, guaranteed.
So let’s begin.
Fact: EVERY business needs conversion tracking
As a WordStream consultant, I’ve come across plenty of folks who prefer to not have conversion tracking set up. Usually, this is because they manually track conversions on their own or because they sometimes are unsure of what tracking could look like for them. After all, not every business is a cookie-cutter purchase or call-based model. However, I always advise against this because there’s a fit for tracking in every account.
Some of the more typical conversion actions include calls, form fills, and purchases, but there are many more that could be a better fit for your business, such as live chat messages, content downloads, and bookings (more on that later).
At the least, conversion tracking is a way to quantify the value of your advertising. At the most, it’s an imperative grounding metric to make sense of all other data points within your account. Since all PPC decisions are usually made based on historical data because no one likes just guessing, then you really need conversion tracking set up right if you want to continuously optimize your account and get the best bang for your buck.
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