Creating a Conversion Tracking Code for AdWords
AdWords provides a simple step-by-step process for setting up a conversion. Within your AdWords account, click Tools from the navigation bar and select Conversions from the dropdown menu.
When you start creating a new conversion, you’ll see several options for conversion sources. For this example (tracking a form submission), we’ll choose Website.
Next, you can customize several options for your conversion.
- Name: Give your conversion a custom name to distinguish it from other conversion points on your site.
- Value: Assign a currency value to a conversion.
- Count: Decide whether to count total conversions or unique conversions. The “unique” setting won’t count multiple times if the same person submits a form more than once.
- Conversion windows: Determine how long after a person visits a site to credit a conversion to AdWords. For example, within a 30-day conversion window, a person who clicked an ad at some point and came back to the site a couple of weeks later would still be credited as an AdWords converter.
- Category: Designate a conversion as a purchase, sign-up, lead, view of a key page, or other.
- Optimization: Choose to use this conversion for AdWords bid strategies.
Once you’ve selected the options you want, you can proceed to the next page. Here, you’ll be given code to add to your site to begin tracking conversions from AdWords.
Consider keeping this page open in a separate tab while we go over getting the code into your site. Our recommended method of adding is via Google Tag Manager.
Adding AdWords Tracking to Your Site using Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) provides an easy way to set up AdWords conversion tracking without forcing you to mess with the source code for a site. Once the GTM code is in place across a site, you can set an AdWords conversion code to fire on the submission of any form.
If you haven’t done so already, see our article on Implementing Analytics with Google Tag Manager for details on getting GTM in place on your site. You’ll just need to add one small snippet of JavaScript code across your site (or ask your developer to add it). Once GTM is set up, you can use its web interface to configure AdWords conversion tracking on your site.
First, from within your site’s container in GTM, add a new tag.
You’ll now see a list of several types of tags you can create. Choose Google AdWords.
Next, choose a Tag Type of AdWords Conversion Tracking. You’ll then want to cross-reference your AdWords Conversion code to input the Conversion ID and Conversion Label. If you are tracking values, you’ll want to fill in the Conversion Value field, as well.
Finally, in the fourth (“Fire On”) section, you can choose when to fire the conversion tracking code. If your site serves a “Thank You” page to users who submit the form, select “Some Pages.” In the box that pops up, create a trigger based on the page that should fire the conversion.
For this example, we want the conversion code to fire on a page that ends in /thankyou. Of course, your Thank You page URLs may differ depending on your site’s setup, especially if you have multiple thank you pages.
Once you’ve set up the tag via GTM, don’t forget to publish your container live (button in the upper right), so the code you just configured will be enabled on your live site.
Seeing Conversion Data in AdWords
With the conversion tracking code set up and deployed on your site, you can now track results as they come in. To do this, check the Converted Clicks column within the interface. If your code is installed properly and people are indeed converting on your site, you should begin to see numbers here.
You’ll want to pay attention to multiple metrics:
- Converted Clicks: total number of clicks that resulted in conversions, correlating to total leads from AdWords on your site
- Cost/Converted Click: average cost for each converted click (crucial for tracking ROI)
- Click Conversion Rate: percentage of clicks that resulted in conversions, showing how likely visitors from AdWords are to be potential customers
Note that by selecting the various tabs within the interface, you can view conversion data on the Campaign, Ad Group, Ad, or Keyword level. Each of these views will allow you to further optimize your account. For example, you’ll want to use successfully converting ad copy to guide writing of future ads, while bidding up or down on keywords based on conversion performance.
Conclusion
When running an AdWords campaign, be sure to set up conversion tracking for any actions on your site that correlate to leads for your business. AdWords and Google Tag Manager provide a fairly user-friendly process for creating a code and getting it to fire on a form submission within your site. Once you’ve set up conversion tracking, use it to measure the success of your campaigns and the value of AdWords in driving business.