I was recently setting up a new Google Ad campaign for a client and optimizing an old campaign they had running for several months.

Upon reviewing their websites and existing campaigns I noticed they weren't tracking all of their conversions. They had a 'Schedule Now' button that sent visitors to a SimplyBook scheduling app, which was hosted on a separate domain.

Unfortunately, SimplyBook doesn't allow you to redirect the visitors to a URL of your choice after they finish scheduling AND they don't integrate with Google Analytics. This means we couldn't track scheduled appointments as a conversion.

So what's the next best solution without requiring the client to change scheduling apps? Track clicks on the 'Schedule Now' button as a conversion in the Google Ad campaign.

Traditionally I handled this using Universal Google Analytic Events and adding a custom attribute to the HTML button element to track clicks on that button as a Google Analytics Goal. Squarespace doesn't allow you to add custom attributes to HTML elements, however.

That's when I decided to dive into the world of Google Tag Manager (GTM). Until recently I had avoided GTM simply because I hadn't used it much. I didn't see any reason to use it since I typically keep the number of scripts on my website to a minimum and manually inserting a few scripts was easy.

Well here was a reason to use it. With Google Tag Manager it's a lot easier to track clicks on any HTML element. Since this was a new Google Analytics account I also decided to set it all up with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) since that is now the default with new Google Analytics accounts.

Click Here to see how to set it all up in 4 easy steps!

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