top gun trust your instruments - google ad grants: conversion tracking

Google Ad Grants Conversion Tracking

I’m a former engineer working in flight test and am a strong believer in instruments and data. PPC without conversion tracking is like flying an aircraft without instruments. Maybe you remember the scene in Top Gun where Cougar thinks they’re flying upside down? He suffered from vertigo, his instincts and basic senses were totally off. Still he doesn’t want to trust the instruments. It’s the same with Google Ads. Of course, you know your business and customers well, so why even bothering? It might even work like this. The point is, without tracking conversions from clicks to lead, from lead to sale you will never know for sure! This is true for any business, whether you are a nonprofit or not. You will never know how well you deliver your message in both ads and website if you don’t measure.
 

Examples of Conversions:

 
Clicks measure how many people visit your website while conversions measure a value. Conversion goals can be donations, sign- ups for a newsletter, volunteer sign- ups, membership form completions, calls to your organization, time spent on your website or how many pages were visited.
 

How to track conversions on your website?

 
Determine the tool you want to use to track conversions:
 
You have two options here: Track with a tag from your Google Ad Grants account or import Goals from Google Analytics.
 
  1. Tag from Google Ad Grant account: You configure a conversion in your Google Ad Grant account and then have to add a code snippet on your website. The tag is triggered as soon as a visitor engaged with your content where the code is placed. This can be simplified with using Google Tag Manager. You insert some code for Google Tag Manager once on your website. Then you can configure tags and triggers with the relevant information obtained from the conversion configured in your Google Ad Grant account.
  2. Google Analytics: Here’s the link to the article about Google Analytics Basics. You create goals in Google Analytics and re-import them into your Ad Grants account.
 

Select meaningful conversion actions:

 
Here Google has some specific rules for Ad Grants accounts and accepts only a couple of goal types. But nevertheless, start with answering the question: What are the goals of your organization?
 
  • (Google Ads, Google Analytics) Destination: Track visitors that complete a meaningful action on your site. This can be seeing a “Thank You” page after sign up of a membership, newsletter, volunteer, information request. Disallowed is tracking your homepage or other frequently visited pages. The number of conversions will be equal with clicks.
  • (Google Analytics) Event: This is your choice if you for example have a “Contact Us” button that leads to a popup widget and not a specific page. Instead of tracking a page, which is not possible with a popup, you can track the click of the button instead.
  • (Google Analytics) Duration: Track if someone clicked on your ad and spent at least 2 minutes on your site. This is an excellent goal to track the quality of your website.
  • (Google Ads) Phone call: This is available only for some countries. You can use this to see how effectively your ad clicks lead to phone calls, scheduling for example an appointment.
 

Other Google Ad Grant rules:

In order to be compliant with the Ad Grants Policy there are a few extra things to consider. If you created your Ad Grants account since January 2018 you have to follow these rules. These rules also apply to you if you use a Smart Bidding strategy like Maximize Conversions or Target CPA. 
  • Conversion tracking must be accurate and report at least one conversion per month. If conversion tracking is not recording conversions, there might be a mistake in your setup. You either have to troubleshoot your Google Analytics setup or your Google Ads conversion tracking tag. It’s best practice to check whether conversion tracking is still working on a daily basis. Maybe your web admin had to do an update and now something isn’t working together as it should? Don’t get mad at your admin, this person is doing their job and it’s a team effort to keep a website healthy!
  •  If your conversion rate is higher than 15% you have to justify why this goal is meaningful to you and that the strong performance is on purpose. Website traffic can be tracked via clicks. Consider tracking only the “Thank You” page or chose a different goal as explained above. Maybe you set up conversion tracking as “count every”? Consider changing it to “count one” instead where appropriate.

As always, if you don’t have the capacity to manage all of this, don’t hesitate to get in touch! Ping marketing can help. Here is an overview of our Google Ad Grants management services.