Gaining conversions is essential for the success of any business. Conversions are essentially the products of all of your efforts.
There is a common misconception that conversions only apply to successful sales, but they can also refer to how many people signed up for your newsletter or shared your content…essentially any key metric that you want to track!
Your desired conversions may differ depending on your business model, but something that doesn’t differ is the importance of tracking conversions.
At Blaze, we work with a variety of businesses and so we know more than anyone just how important conversion tracking is.
What is Conversion Tracking?
Conversion tracking on Google Ads is a crucial tool for businesses looking to measure the effectiveness of their online advertising efforts.
It involves setting up and monitoring actions valuable to the business, such as purchases, sign-ups, phone calls, or other key engagements after a user clicks on an ad.
By tracking these actions, companies can gain insights into their ads’ performance, understand the return on investment (ROI) from their ad spend, and make data-driven decisions to optimise their marketing strategies.
This tracking allows advertisers to identify which keywords, ads, and campaigns are driving valuable customer actions. This enables more effective resource allocation and ultimately improves the overall effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts.
So, unsurprisingly, conversion tracking is essential to the success of your business.
Though conversion tracking is brilliant, it is by no means perfect.
Here are some of the issues that you may encounter through conversion tracking and how you can fix the issues without having a complete meltdown.
Wrong Conversion Type Activated
So you are getting conversions, but they are either duplicating or overreporting on Google Ads; the reason for this is usually in the goal set-up.
If you are a lead-gen-based company, then the mistake everyone makes is that they have ticked the wrong box in the goal setting of the conversion. Though this may seem obvious, it’s easier to miss than you might think.
For lead generation campaigns, you want your potential customers to make an enquiry; you only want one conversion per enquiry.
If you are overreporting, go to goals-summary—settings and see if your count is monitoring one per conversion or every conversion.
This will ensure that you only get the data you need so you don’t become overwhelmed by irrelevant information.
Tag Manager Not Live
Are you struggling to get any conversions at all? You might have to check that your Tag Manager has been pushed live.
A common mistake is going through the Tag Manager process and forgetting to publish to live, so it sits in the default workspace. This small, overlooked detail can have incredibly frustrating consequences.
Thankfully, this can be easily checked by looking for anything in the workspace and working out when the last update was published.
This issue is a clear example of why hiring a good PPC manager matters. They are aware of all the small details and can do the finicky work that you may forget.
Linked to the Wrong GA/TM
An essential part of your tracking is to be connected to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to make the necessary strategic decisions for your site.
You may encounter numerous issues if you’re connected to the wrong Analytics/ Manager.
Mistakes often happen when a company is with an agency and brings things in-house or to another agency and can no longer gain access to their previous analytics, or the person who set up all your tracking has long left before the transition from UA to GA4, so new tracking needs to be implemented.
However, if you’ve done everything right and it’s still not working, the reason may be that you haven’t unlinked the previous accounts.
To do this, go to Tools> Data Manager and manage the links on the right-hand side.
Tracking Phone Calls of Shorter Duration
Tracking phone calls as a conversion is an effective way to count how many leads your sales team are getting from Google ads.
The problem comes when the phone calls being tracked are ALL phone calls.
But as anyone who has conducted a phone call will know, not every phone call is a lead. You may get spam calls and you may even get butt dialled, so it makes no sense to include these calls in your overall statistics.
Because we are incredibly kind, we are happy to give you our top tips for knowing whether or not you should include a call in your overall statistics.
The next time you have a lead call that you can actively pinpoint, record the duration of the call. This will give you a good idea of which calls you should include in your overall statistics.
You can set your call tracking to count a lead only once it hits a certain time frame, so your statistics are not flooded with irrelevant data.
To do this, go to Conversions > Summary > Call Length > Enter Time.
You’re welcome.
UTM Campaign Tracking Contains a Conversion Trigger.
If you do not know what a conversion trigger is, it tends to be an elected word that, when identified, becomes a conversion.
For example, say you pinpointed ‘thank you’ as your conversion trigger. You may encounter an issue if you use this word elsewhere in your campaign; this will trigger a conversion, even though it is not one.
If you constantly encounter an issue with your conversions being triggered, the simple fix is to change how your campaign name appears in the UTM parameters.
If you are unsure where to start when it comes to keyword triggers, you may need to assign some time for brainstorming.
If you are really struggling, it would definitely be beneficial to hire the help of a PPC professional. They have years of experience when it comes to keyword conversions and know exactly which words will and won’t work.
Understanding Conversion Tracking With Blaze
Hopefully, we have been able to establish that effective conversion tracking on Google Ads is essential for accurately measuring the success of your advertising efforts.
In this blog, we also outlined several common pitfalls that may lead to inaccurate data, such as picking the wrong conversion type, failing to publish changes in Tag Manager, or linking the wrong analytics account.
By carefully setting up and regularly auditing your conversion tracking, you can ensure the reliability of your data, enabling more informed decisions and ultimately optimising your digital marketing strategies.
Get in touch with our team today for more advice about conversion tracking or to get in touch with our ads team for their assistance.
If you need help with your conversions, we are the right people to turn to, you only need to look at our case studies to see that.