Top 3 Conversion Tracking Mistakes You're Making With Google Ads
Jan 11, 2024
The #1 issue I see with most Google Ad Campaign's has to do with conversion tracking. The first rule of data-driven marketing is "you can't improve upon anything you're not accurately tracking".
This means accurate conversion tracking is the first step to creating a successful Google Ad Campaign.
Accurate conversion tracking allows you to report on leads and sales coming in from the campaign first of all and most importantly, it allows you to see which keywords, locations, demographics, audiences, etc. are driving leads and sales. Once you have this data, it's easy to make the necessary adjustments on the campaign to increase your return on ad spend (ROAS).
Without this conversion data, you're essentially left driving in the dark with your campaign and there's very little you can do to improve campaign performance to increase ROAS.
Here are the top 3 main mistakes I see with conversion tracking:
They're not tracking conversions at all. This is still fairly common since a lot of business owners don't understand what conversion tracking even is for.
They're tracking the wrong thing as a conversion. I see a fair amount of campaigns tracking views of the contact us page as a conversion. It's much better to track contact form submissions as a conversion. Even better if you can track offline sales conversions from your CRM. The bottom line is, you want to track leads or sales as a conversion, not micro-conversions like viewing the contact us page.
They're not tracking every possible way a website visitor can become a lead or sale on their website. For example, they may be tracking only form submissions even though their website lists phone numbers, email addresses, has a appointment booking widget and has a chat widget. Anytime a website visitor can become a lead or customer that we can't track as a conversion and attribute back to the ad campaign, it's what I call "leakage".
The more leakage a campaign has, the harder it is to optimize a campaign to increase conversions, lower cost per conversion and increase ROAS. If you can't track something as a conversion, like say the chat leads coming in from the website, you should consider removing it completely from the website.