How To Connect Your Website Conversion Tracking To Your Google Adwords Campaigns
Learn how to track conversion in Google Adwords.
What Are Conversions In Google Ads?
A conversion is any action a person who views your ad takes, that you count as an action that is valuable to your business. Ultimately, you need to choose what counts as a conversion. For some businesses, this might be when someone chooses to call the business, click a ‘book an appointment or ‘book a call’ button on the website, sign-up for a newsletter, or make a purchase. Whatever it is, you will most likely need to set up conversion tracking on your website, and then link that to your Google Adwords account.
How To Track Conversion In Google Adwords
When you create a Google Adwords campaign (whether that is a Paid Search campaign, Display campaign, or Video campaign) you should set up conversion tracking so that you can see how effective your ads actually are for converting web visitors to actual customers. Below we outline the steps you need to take to properly learn how to track conversions in Google Adwords.
Set Up Conversion Tracking On Your Website Using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
Before you can set up conversion tracking for your campaigns in Google Adwords, you will need to set up conversion tracking on your website using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. You can follow this tutorial we wrote on how to set up conversion tracking for your website.
Once you have done that, we will work through the following steps so that you can create, manage and report on ad conversions properly!
Link your Google Analytics Account and Google Adwords Account
Log into your Google Analytics account and select the ‘Admin’ menu option at the bottom of the left-hand menu.
Select the Property you want to use and select the ‘Google Ads Link’ menu option under ‘Product Links’
Press the ‘Link’ button to create a new link and choose the ‘Property’ and Google Ads account that you manage and want to link together. Keep the default settings as is for personalized advertising and auto-tagging (unless you have a specific reason or strategy to not use the default settings).
Submit the request and you should have the two accounts linked within 24 hours!
Import Your Google Analytics ‘Conversions’ Into Your Adwords Account
(For Conversion-Based Bidding Strategies and Better Reporting)
After you have created ‘Conversion’ events in Google Analytics (read our tutorial on how to set up conversion tracking for your website here), you can import these into your Adwords account so that you can get better insights on whether or not your paid ads are converting visitors, and you can use Google’s conversion bidding strategies to automatically optimize your ads for better conversions (because now Google actually knows what you count as a valuable conversion for your business).
To get started:
Log into your Google Ads account and click the ‘Tools and Setting’ icon in the header menu. Choose the ‘Conversions’ sub-menu option to open the settings panel you will need.
Click the ‘New Conversion Action’ button at the top.
Choose the ‘Import’ option and select Google Analytics GA4, and web app. This should bring up the list of conversion actions you have created already in your linked Google Analytics account. Select all of the conversion actions that you want to track with Google Ads.
Press save/submit and voila you are done! You can now use these website conversions to optimize your ad’s bidding strategy and to report on how many people completed these events from ads!
For some more nitty-gritty details about imported Google Analytics conversion actions in your Adwords account, you can read the relevant Google Help Doc on Importing Analytics Conversions Into Your Adwords Account.
Import Your Google Analytics ‘Audiences’ Into Your Adwords Account
(For Remarketing and Better Reporting)
Log into your Google Ads account and click the ‘Tools and Setting’ icon in the header menu. Select the ‘Audience Manager’ menu option.
Click the ‘Set Up a New Audience Source’ option (or the plus sign icon).
Link to your Google Analytics (GA4) account and submit.
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