3 Simple Steps to Improve Your Google Ads Conversion Tracking
Are you confident about your Google Ads conversion tracking setup? If you’re curious about whether you can improve the accuracy of your tracking, these are 3 simple steps to improve the accuracy of your tracking to know what's working and what’s wasting your budget.
Here are three easy ways to improve your Google Ads conversion tracking:
1. Use a Google Tag Instead of Importing from Google Analytics
Google Ads offers two main ways to track conversions: importing from GA4 or using the Google tag directly.
The best option is to set up using the Google Tag:
It uses first-party data, which is more reliable and privacy-compliant.
It tracks conversions more accurately and immediately, without relying on GA4’s attribution model or reporting delay.
2. Use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to Manage All Tags
Google Tag Manager uses one container for all the tags you add to your website and makes it much easier for a user without web development experience to add tags to the website as needed.
Benefits to using Google Tag Manager:
It keeps all your tracking tags in one place.
Everything loads together, making tracking more reliable.
It can be used for all platforms: Google Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, and more.
It’s cleaner, faster, and easier to manage long-term. It’s also easier to see all the tags on your website in one view, so overtime, when certain tags are no longer necessary, you can easily remove them from your website to prevent slower load times. This helps you keep your website overall in a much more organized and clean state.
3. Track One Conversion per Session (Not Every One)
By default, Google Ads tracks every time a conversion action happens. But if for some reason someone submits a form twice in one visit, that’s not two new leads. Tracking both forms as a conversion leads to overcounting the true results of your marketing efforts.
To keep your data clean, update your conversion settings to count “one” conversion per interaction, especially for lead gen actions like form submissions, click-to-call buttons, and booking confirmations.
This gives you a clearer picture of how many actual leads you’re getting.
Conversion goal settings in Google Ads
Bonus Tip: Do you still have old UA Google Analytics tags lingering on your site (from before the switch to GA4 in 2023)? It’s time to get rid of them! They’re no longer tracking any data and are just cluttering up your website. Remove the tags from the site and the conversion goals from your Google Ads account for more streamlined management.
Think You Might Need Some Help with Conversion Tracking?
Google Ads works best when you provide it with accurate data. By making these small changes, you’ll get better insight into what’s driving real results, and you’ll make smarter decisions with your ad budget. But every account has its nuances, so if you think you need some additional support to ensure you’re tracking the right actions accurately, see how Clicks By K can help!
