Mastering Google Ads Conversion Tracking: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2025

Want to make the most of your online advertising efforts? Then getting the hang of conversion tracking in Google Ads is a must. This powerful tool makes it possible to see exactly what valuable actions the users that interact with your ads are taking, providing crucial insights into which strategies are driving the most meaningful results from your paid ad spend.

By understanding and leveraging conversion tracking, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that optimize your campaigns, inform your bidding strategy, and ultimately contribute to the growth of your business. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the ins and outs of Google Ads conversion tracking, exploring how it works, the benefits it offers, and best practices for optimizing it for your specific goals.

Let’s get started.

Conversion Tracking in Google Ads, What’s It All About?

Conversion tracking is a feature within Google Ads that, when implemented, shows what actions are being taken by the customers who interact with your ads, and is a must-have for running a successful Google Ads campaign. With conversion tracking, you can gain insights into which “conversion actions” (customizable actions that you deem important for your business) customers take as a result of engaging with your ads. These actions can range from making a purchase to filling out a contact form, depending on the goals you have for your campaigns.

The primary purpose of conversion tracking is to provide insights and measurable data on how your ads are performing, allowing you to evaluate which ones are most effective in driving valuable actions on your website. With the insights that conversion tracking provides, you can refine your campaign strategies, allocate your budget more effectively, and guide your overall marketing strategy.

Perks of Using Conversion Tracking

A Closer Look at Landing Page & Site Performance

Conversion tracking gives you a comprehensive view of what happens on your site as a result of ad interactions. By tracking various user actions — such as form submissions or purchases — you can better understand which parts of your site are most effective in driving conversions. This data also reveals how users navigate through your site, providing critical insights into the link between user behavior and site performance.

Informed Decision-Making

Since tracking conversions enables you to see where key events are happening on your website, you can more accurately measure the success of your campaigns. This insight is crucial when it comes to making decisions about budget allocation and strategy adjustments. For example, if you notice that certain keywords or ads are performing exceptionally well in driving conversions that benefit your establishment, you can invest more in those areas to maximize your results.

Optimized Bidding Strategies

With conversion tracking, you can leverage automated bidding strategies such as Target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) or Target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). These strategies use historical conversion data to optimize your bids in real-time, ensuring you achieve the best possible results for your campaigns.

Enhanced Reporting & Insights

Google Ads provides detailed reports and insights with conversion tracking data. You can analyze metrics such as conversion rate, cost per conversion, and conversion value, among others. When regularly reviewed, these insights help you monitor the overall progress of your campaigns and adapt your strategies accordingly.

Choosing Your Most Valuable Conversion Actions

The key to the success of your Google Ads campaigns? Tracking the right conversion actions. And when it comes to identifying the ones that are most valuable for your purposes, it helps to consider the type of business you run.

If your business focuses on lead generation, you’ll want to target actions that indicate a high level of interest and engagement from potential customers, such as:

• Sales-ready forms: These are forms that visitors fill out to request more information, a quote, or a demo of your products or services. When potential customers submit these forms, it’s generally a good indicator that they’re ready to engage with your sales team.
• Webinar sign-ups: When people register for your webinars, it means that they are interested in the information you have to offer. More importantly, they’re interested enough to take time out of their day to listen to what you have to say, making them strong potential leads for your business.

• Resource downloads: Whitepaper, eBook, guide, or other content downloads are another indicator of interest in your offerings — especially if users are asked to submit personal details to access these resources.

For eCommerce businesses on the other hand, the primary goal of Google Ads campaigns is to drive sales. So if you run this type of business, tracking actions that directly lead to purchases should be your top priority. These include:

• Adds to cart: Monitoring the number of users who add products to their shopping carts helps you gauge product interest and understand shopping behavior.
• Entering checkout: Tracking when visitors enter the checkout process is crucial for identifying common drop-off points and optimizing the purchase funnel.
• Purchases: The ultimate conversion action for eCommerce businesses, tracking completed transactions sheds valuable light into sales performance.

Conversion Tracking Setup 101: How To Get Started

The first step toward reaping the benefits of conversion tracking in Google Ads is to set it up correctly. And when it comes to implementing tracking, there are two primary methods you can choose between: either through Google Analytics 4 (GA4) or directly within Google Ads itself. Each method has its own benefits, and if you’re looking for an even more comprehensive understanding of your users’ behaviors, you can also opt to use both.

Setting Up Google Ads Tracking Through GA4

The main benefit of choosing this route is that it distributes conversion value between google ads and other touch points a user may have with data driven attribution. This attribution method considers all touchpoints that users interact with before converting and divides credit for the conversion across each one. With data-driven attribution, you get a more granular look at how individual interactions contribute to conversions for a more comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Additionally, this option allows you to set up conversion tracking once for two properties — both in GA4 and Google Ads, saving time and lending to more cohesive data integration.

Setting Up Tracking Directly Through Google Ads

Alternatively, you can set up conversion tracking directly through Google Ads. This method provides the benefit of attributing 100% of the conversion and conversion value to the Google ad that led to the action. This can be particularly useful if you want to measure the direct impact of your Google Ads campaigns.

Google ads conversion tracking is also faster. When tracking through GA4, it can sometimes take extra time for conversions to happen, get tracked, and then imported to Google Ads.

Using Both Methods for In-Depth Analysis

If you want the most comprehensive view of user interactions and conversion data, you can set up conversion tracking using both GA4 and Google Ads. This dual setup allows you to:

• Compare attribution models and see any discrepancies between what GA4 and Google Ads will show for conversions
• Cross-verify reports and ensure data accuracy with two sources of conversion data

General Setup Steps

No matter which method you choose, setting up conversion tracking generally begins with using Google Tag Manager (GTM) to create and add tags to your site without directly editing its code. In GTM, tags are short snippets of code that send data to systems like GA4 and Google Ads. However, they will only “fire” when certain triggers (or the actions that you choose to track) are detected.

To get GTM up and running, you’ll need to…

1. Integrate GTM with your website: Create a Google Tag Manager account, set up a new container, and add the GTM container code snippet to both the header and footer of your site for seamless tag management.
2. Implement GA4 and Google Ads base tags: These base tags are essential as they initialize tracking on your website, allowing data to flow into GA4 and Google Ads. These base tags lay the foundation for further data collection, audience creation, and analysis.
3. Test and verify: Before publishing, use GTM’s Preview Mode to test that your tags and triggers are functioning correctly, ensuring reliable data collection and reporting.
4. Set up the data layer: Define the specific data you want to track (e.g., transactions, form submissions) and implement data layer values on your site to capture user interactions and pass them to GA4 and Google Ads via GTM.
5. Create conversion tags: Use GTM to implement tags that trigger when important conversion actions — such as form submissions or purchases — occur, enabling precise tracking of key business metrics.

Following Best Practices for Accurate Tracking

If you want to maximize the benefits of conversion tracking, consider these best practices and professional tips.

Define Primary & Secondary Conversions

Identify the key actions that matter most to your business, categorizing them as primary or secondary conversions. Google Ads will optimize your campaigns based on primary conversion actions, while secondary conversions can be tracked for insights without influencing campaign outcomes. For example, you might optimize campaigns for purchases (primary conversions) but still track “add to cart” actions (secondary conversions) to monitor user behavior.

Enable Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced conversions capture additional customer data, such as email addresses or phone numbers, during conversion events, which improves the accuracy of your conversion tracking. This data is securely hashed and sent to Google, enabling better matching of conversions. Enhanced conversions are vital as they provide more precise targeting and measurement, leading to better campaign performance.

Take Advantage of Offline Conversion Tracking

By importing CRM data into your Google Ads account, you can track both online and offline conversions. For example, if a customer clicks on an ad and contacts your company, it’s tracked as one conversion. When that lead converts into a closed deal, your CRM sends this information to Google Ads, allowing you to see which campaigns are not only generating leads but also closing deals.

Regularly Review Your Conversion Tracking Setup

Just like websites, conversion tracking setups can sometimes break or become outdated. Regularly check and maintain your tracking to ensure it’s working correctly. This prevents your campaigns from running without accurate conversion data, ensuring you can make informed decisions.

Taking a Leaf Out of Seasoned Marketers’ Books

One of the best ways to learn the ins and outs of getting the most out of your conversion tracking is to follow in the footsteps of those who went before you, and we’ve been perfecting our technique for a while. Here’s our $.02:

1. Google Ads campaigns that run well always have these three things in common: They’re set up correctly to target the right customer, they drive to a highly converting website or landing page, and they accurately track the actions that occur on those pages. Each of these components rely on the other two for your campaigns to generate good results, so it’s crucial to put the time and effort into prioritizing all three.
2. Always, always (always) integrate Google Ads directly with your customer relationship management (CRM) system when possible. This ensures that you’re able to get the full picture when it comes to the leads you generate. By piping CRM-accurate data into Google Ads, you can start to optimize for conversion value (which leads to more revenue) vs. conversions for conversions’ sake. Just because a campaign is great at generating leads, doesn’t mean that it is great at getting leads that close. This is information you’ll want to be sure to know.

Troubleshooting Common Issues

From time to time, issues with conversion tracking can arise so it’s important to be prepared to do some troubleshooting. If conversions aren’t being recorded correctly, it could be because updates to the website or plugins are throwing off the triggers that fire your tags. If you notice a slowdown in conversions (or if they stop altogether), we recommend going into Google Tag Manager Preview Mode to test your conversion tags and diagnose the issue. More often than not, conversion tags fail to fire because their triggers aren’t set up correctly, so it’s also a good idea to double check to make sure they’re properly configured if you notice that something isn’t right.

While we’re on the topic of issues, steering clear of common pitfalls can help your tracking stay running smoothly and efficiently. To avoid them…

• Be sure to set up your events correctly in the data layer. When you don’t dedicate the time to get this right, you won’t be able to set up triggers for your tags, meaning that your tags won’t work properly.
• Avoid tracking button clicks as conversions. Tracking button clicks, such as those for form submissions or purchases, can lead to inaccurate reporting if errors or multiple clicks occur. Since a button might be clicked more than once due to issues like form errors or accidental clicks, it can result in inflated or misleading conversion data. Instead, focus on firing tags based on data layer information to ensure more accurate and reliable conversion reporting.
• When it comes to purchase tracking, include order IDs and the items purchased in addition to the purchase value. If you’re only concentrating on value, you won’t have any visibility into which products are driving your sales.
• Always use enhanced conversions. This feature uses any first-party data (such as an email address, name, phone number, etc.) captured by your conversion tags and matches customers with their Google accounts. If you don’t have this enabled, you’ll miss out on conversions you could otherwise take advantage of.

It All Boils Down to This…

Google Ads conversion tracking is a game-changer for businesses like yours, who are serious about measuring the impact of their online advertising efforts. By providing clear insights into which actions are driving value, it empowers you to refine your strategies and make smarter decisions that lead to better results — whether you’re aiming to boost sales, generate leads, or increase engagement.

If you haven’t already implemented conversion tracking in your Google Ads campaigns, now is the time to start. The insights you’ll gain are invaluable, and the process is easier than you might think. But if you do need help, the team of digital marketing experts at Vital are here for you.