Module 3 - Leads and sales tracking

Why does conversion tracking matter more than the campaign itself?

Because having the right audiences, good creative and well built campaigns is all well and good, but if you are not tracking your leads and your sales you have got a problem. Google wants you to provide as much detail and as much data back into the system as you can possibly give it. The more data you give back, the better your campaigns are going to perform, and that is a fact.

The lazy marketeer, the one who sets up maybe one or two conversion actions, is the one who is going to suffer in the long run. You can still get away with it to some extent nowadays. If you are running video campaigns and you have got a conversion action of a sale or an enquiry, that will work as long as you are getting a decent number and Google can start to profile the people in that conversion funnel and give you more people like that. But try to give Google as many touch points along that journey as possible.

Where do you set conversions up?

Conversions are set up through the tools manager, under conversions, but we use and recommend Google Tag Manager to create the conversion actions for your campaigns. The account I am showing you here is an inactive test account, so I am just showing you some of the list of conversion actions.

There is a whole separate piece on Google Tag Manager later in the course, and you might want to go over it, because it is going to take time to learn. What you are going to do is create your conversion events based on the different factors and actions your potential customer takes when interacting with your ads.

Setting a Google Tag Manager account up is easy. It is a piece of code installed into your website, and if you do not know how to do that, get your webmaster to do it for you.

What counts as a conversion action?

Almost any meaningful action on your site counts, not just a sale. It could be reaching a thank you page, clicking a certain URL, browsing a certain number of pages, or watching a certain amount of a certain video. Obviously it could also be a sale and an amount, reaching the basket page, or reaching the checkout page. You can then split all of these different people out into different events.

For this example we are going to set up time on site as a conversion action. As we go through this course, make sure you name everything as you do it, and name it the same everywhere. I am going to name this one in Google Tag Manager and then name it exactly the same in Google Ads: time on site greater than 30 seconds.

The tag configuration for this event is a Google Ads conversion tracking event, so Google Tag Manager wants the data from within Google Ads. I create a new conversion event on my website, the category is page view, and the name is page view time on website greater than 30 seconds.

Should every conversion have a value?

Values for conversions are a massive debate, and my personal view is that all conversions have some value. Time on site over 30 seconds is worth more than time on site under 10 seconds, because the people under 10 seconds are the wrong audience and the people over 30 seconds are better.

You might have another conversion action for people over two minutes, three minutes or five minutes, or for people who viewed certain other pages within the site. There are all sorts of conversions you can set up depending on how your business operates, but every conversion action has got a value. I might just start out with a pound, because I am prepared to pay a pound to get somebody onto the site to stay and browse around.

Should you report the exact sale value back to Google?

What I am going to say here may seem a little unusual: you do not always want to tell Google the absolute truth about the value. If you have got a product worth 300 pounds and the conversion action is the thank you page following checkout, we do not want to tell Google we are doing massively well by reporting the full 300. In that scenario I would probably put in 150, to try to get double the value out of Google.

You can run all the campaigns on exact conversion value, but the issue is how you then tie those numbers, in terms of actual sales, back into a conversion action that has in theory no value. Time on site over 30 seconds does not produce any actual value for us.

You can work it out. If I get 100 people on the site who all spend 30 seconds on the site, and I get a sale for 300, in theory that would be 30 cents for a conversion for somebody over 30 seconds, if you see my logic. That can be quite an interesting exercise to work out and then see in your analytics what is happening.

What are the other settings on a conversion action?

The other settings control how often a conversion counts, the conversion window, whether Google optimises for it, and the attribution model. I am going to set this time on site conversion at a pound to start with, and I am not going to use different values for each conversion. You can import conversion values using Google Tag Manager, but that is getting more advanced.

I am going to count this once only, because I do not want somebody to browse around, come back and go back on, since it would count them twice and that would be two conversions.

The view through conversion window here is 30 days. We recommend you do not muck about with these conversion windows.

Under including conversions, you might want to monitor a conversion rather than optimise for it. You can set some conversions up to just show in your data, so that Google is not optimising for them. Attribution here is last click. Then create and continue.

How do you connect Google Ads to Google Tag Manager?

You connect them by copying the conversion ID and the conversion label from Google Ads into the tag in Google Tag Manager. Take the conversion ID and pop it in, then go back to Ads, take the conversion label, because that is what this hangs off, and go back to Google Tag Manager and put the conversion label in. You will also want a conversion linking event switched on, and I can show you how to do that in other parts of the course.

How do you build the trigger for time on site?

The trigger for time on site is a timer, and the timer interval is always in milliseconds, so 30 seconds is 30,000 milliseconds. Then you set when it happens, which is when the page URL contains our website.

I have missed out the forward slash there. When we get it in the right format it will work. There you go, that is the correct URL. Save, and save again, and that is a 30 second conversion action set up.

One little interesting thing in Google Tag Manager: if you click last edited and put that to the top, you can see the one you have just created.

What do you do before the tag goes live?

You press submit and give your amends a name, then publish. So this one would be add 30 second conversion event, plus anything else about why you are doing it, or which campaign it is for. I do not tend to come back in here much, so the title is just so I can see when I added it. Then you publish it, and it is uploaded to Google Tag Manager.

Back within Google Ads, click next and done, and the conversion action is there. You cannot see it because I am in the way again. Well, there you go: page view on site over 30 seconds. That is that conversion event set up.

How many events should you be tracking?

As many as you honestly can, because you literally cannot give Google enough data. The more you give back, the more tracking you do, the more events you track, the better your campaigns are going to perform.

Look at all of the different touch points in your funnel. Look at how people come onto your site and what they do. It might just be whether somebody clicks a certain menu item, whether they spend a certain amount of time on a certain page, whether they fill in a particular form, or whether they click the phone number. All of these things are valuable, not just sales.

Give each of those events a value, because that is giving good data back to Google. The more of those good events you get, the more of them Google will serve you and the better the audience it will serve you. You can gain the insight from where the best pieces of that audience are coming from and then change your campaigns going forwards. Make sure you set all your conversion events up at the outset.

As with all other things in this course, if you are struggling, ping us an email and I will give you some help.