At the start of my career, all I focused on was learning the Google Ads interface and some basic strategies that I could lay the foundation for cool tricks in the future.
While I tried to learn the equivalent of a kickflip in Google Ads, I was always curious how these conversions I see in my accounts actually work.
How do I even know if they’re working? What if I’m missing out on some potential conversions? I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t sure how the sausage was made.
Why Conversion Tracking Is Important
You’ll want to understand where your conversions are coming from for two major reasons.
- It’s Your North Star In Measuring Success
- Google Ads Heavily Relies On Conversion Data
If you have a lead-gen client, you will want to track any form captures and phone numbers on the site. This will send signals to Google Ads saying, “Hey, your ad got a lead, here’s some data,” Google will take that data and try to learn/leverage it in the future. It’s a more positive version of I eat because I’m sad, I’m sad because I eat. I have leads because I want to feed Google Ads good data; I feed Google Ads good data because I want leads.
So even though there are other ways to measure the success of your paid ads (client meetings, GA4 data, etc), that’s really conversion tracking’s secondary function. The primary function of conversion tracking is to generate learning data to scale your account.
How To Audit Your Conversion Tracking
There are two ways of auditing the health of your conversion tracking from the GADs interface.
- Are your conversions set to primary, and are they connected to your campaigns
- How’s your conversion volume and their “status.”
The first way of auditing will help you avoid making technical goofs. If you don’t have the conversions you want Google to learn from associated with your campaigns, they’re just sitting there.
If your conversion’s action optimization is set to “secondary,” then your campaigns are just observing the conversion.
There are some use cases for this, but if you want to leverage Google Ad’s smart bidding, you must put those guys into “primary.” If you miss this crucial step in your conversion tracking process, it’s like that crummy feeling when you realize you’ve been driving with your emergency brake on by accident.
The second way of auditing is measuring your conversion volume and its recent activity. How are things looking in the last two weeks vs the previous period? What’s looking weird? Are there some conversions that saw a dip in volume or didn’t generate conversions at all?
If you expand your date range and begin to see a pattern of no activity for a conversion, that’s a strong indicator that something is wrong. It’s time to wear your big marketer trousers and diagnose the issue.
Case Study: How I Boosted Performance by +287%
Last year, I inherited a large lead-gen account with a healthy budget of $10,000/month. I analyzed its performance, optimized my targeting, and consolidated a few campaigns. Although I saw some metrics improve, like click-through rates and quality scores, my conversion performance was still nothing to brag about.
Around this time, I was learning how to track conversions via Google Tag Manager, and I decided to apply those skills to my new account and began auditing my conversion tracking. Nearly all my form lead conversions were broken, and I noticed I was missing some valuable tracking on the website.
Once I finished re-structuring the account’s new conversion tracking, I saw results almost immediately. After two weeks, our overall conversions increased by +31% with 16 more leads, but our form leads more than doubled.
After a month, our overall conversions increased by +28% with 30 more leads; our form leads increased by +287%. What was even better was that my client was actually making sales.
TL;DR: Don’t sleep on conversion tracking. It’s not just for reporting—it’s the engine behind smart bidding and growth. Run an audit. Feed the algorithm. Grow your results.