Google Tag and conversion goals should be used to improve the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns. If you drive traffic to such verticals as e-commerce, nutra, commodity and others then a completed conversion is filling out a form, followed by redirection to the “Thank You” page. Here the Google Tag will have to be triggered and the conversion will be counted. Let’s see in detail how to set everything up.
Conversion goals on Google Ads
Let’s start setting up a Google Ads account.
Agency Google Ads accounts: https://cpa.rip/en/services/agency-accounts/#Google_Ads_Agency_Accounts. Manual signup for Google Ads accounts: https://cpa.rip/en/google-ads/accounts-registering/.
- Log in to your Google Ads account
- Select “Goals” from the left menu
- Then, “Summary”.
- And click the “New conversion action” button.
Next, select which conversions you want to track. In our case “Website” is suitable, which allows you to track:
- In the next step, enter the domain of your website (landing page) in the address field and click “Scan”
Google will scan your site code for Google tags or Google Analytics tags and suggest available customization options.
We will use creating conversion goals manually using the code.
- Click “+Add a conversion action manually”
- In the “Goal and action optimization” field, you can choose any option – it does not affect the setting.
- Set the name of the conversion. In our case, it is “thanks”
- Below you can set the value of conversion, but if you don’t know the average cost of a lead at which traffic pays off, you can select the third option “Don’t use …”.
- In our case it is better to set the “Count” setting to “One”, so that if the same user opens the “Thank you” page again, a new conversion will not be counted.
- Click “Agree and continue” to save the conversion goal.
On the “Summary” page we can see the list of conversion goals and their status:
- Click on the newly created goal and you’ll be redirected to settings. Here you can see two ways of adding code to the site:
- Manually – you need to paste the ready-made code from the field into the code of the “Thank You” page of your landing page:
- Using Google Tag Manager (GTM). You will need the “Conversion ID” and “Conversion label” values for this:
Installing the tag
The method is simple and good for one-page sites. In manual mode you need to add 2 tags to the site:
- Google tag – adds visitors to your main remarketing lists and creates cookies on your domain that store data about the ad clicks that led to the visits. This tag should be added to all pages on your site. Copy the suggested code and paste it between the
<head></head>tags on each page of the site:
- Event Tag – the event snippet is used in conjunction with the Google tag and records actions that should be counted as conversions. It can be used to track both the loading of a particular page and the click on a link or element. We’ll choose “Page load.”
Also, insert the suggested event tag code between the <head></head> tags right after the Google tag on the pages you want to track. In our case, it is a “Thank You” page.
Setting up a conversion tag via Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Using Google Tag Manager (GTM) to set up conversion tracking on your Thank You page is a convenient and flexible way to manage tags without having to make direct changes to your site code.
Let’s understand in detail how to add Google Ads conversion tracking tags to your website pages using Google Tag Manager (GTM). First, let’s create a container.
- Go to https://tagmanager.google.com/
- Click “Create Account.”
- Set the name of the account
- Set the name of the container
- And select the “Web” platform.
- Click “Create”.
- Agree to the rules and click “Yes”.
Once the container is created, you will receive a code to install on your site. This code should be added to all pages of the site/landing right after the <head> tag and the second part after the <body> tag.
If your site runs on a popular engine (e.g. WordPress), the easiest way to do it is to use special plugins or type in the site template.
First, you need to create a trigger.
- Click on the “Triggers” item in the left menu
- Click “Trigger Configuration”
- Select the trigger type “Page View”
Now we need to configure the conversion to fire when you go to the “Thank You” page, we have it at the “thanks.html” address
- Select “Some Page View” so that the trigger only fires on a specific page.
- In the box below, select the “Page URL” option
- Next “contains.”
- In the last field, enter a piece of URL contained only in the “thanks” page address. In our case,
thanks. - Click “Save”
- Set the name of the trigger, for example, also “thanks”
- Click “Save”.
- Next, go to “Tags” in the left menu.
- Click on the “Triggering” block
- In the list that appears, select the previously created “thanks” trigger
- Click the “Tag Configuration” block
- Select “Google Ads”
- Select “Google Ads Conversion Tracking”.
- In the next step, enter the “Conversion ID” and “Conversion Label”
Which you got earlier while creating a conversion goal on Google Ads:
- Click “Save”
- Set the name of the tag – “thanks”
- Click “Save” again.
The customized tag appears in the list. To add it to the site you need to publish it.
- Click “Submit”
- Click “Publish”.
- Click “Continue”
Now you must add 2 more tags: Conversion Linker and Google Tag. To do this:
- Go back to “Workspace”
- Select “Tags”.
- Click “New”
- Select the “All pages” trigger from the list
- Click on the “Tag Configuration” block
- Select “Conversion Linker.”
- Click “Save”
- You can leave the name as default
“Google Tag” is added in the same way
- Click “New”.
- Trigger also “All Pages”
- “Tag configuration” select “Google Tag”
- In the “Tag ID” field you need to type the tag ID of your account and save:
You can find the Tag ID on Google Ads on the Tools->Data manager page by clicking “Manage” next to the corresponding item:
Other ways to find “Tag ID” are described in the Google guide: https://support.google.com/tagmanager/answer/12002338#find-tag-id.
Now we have 3 customized tags. We need to publish them again by clicking “Submit” and “Publish”.
There is also a “Preview” button here, which you can use to open the site and check if the tags are working correctly.
- Click “Preview”
- Enter the site address and click “Connect”
After that, the site will be opened in a new window, here we can make a targeted action and get to the “Thank you” page.
Go back to the test window and if everything was configured correctly, we will see our tags in the “Tags Fired” block. Tags that didn’t work will be in “Tags Not Fired”.
Optimization for conversions on Google Ads
When creating a campaign on Google Ads, you can select a customized conversion goal on the “Thank You” page and the system will use the data to improve your bid assignment strategy and increase the effectiveness of your ads.
