Google Ads Conversion Tracking with Google Tag Manager

Updated: January 7th, 2023

If you’re running Google Ads campaigns to drive website traffic, tracking your campaigns’ effectiveness is critical. The best way to do this is by setting up conversions.

How does this help? Some examples that might be relevant to you are:

• You can better understand which ads are working and which ones aren’t. The ads that work will drive more conversions.
• Which keywords are driving more conversions than others? You need to monitor this regularly because you don’t want to spend money on keywords that don’t help you achieve your business goals.
• Google’s algorithms understand your website and business goals better with the help of the conversions that you set up.

These are just a few examples showing what Google Ads Conversion tracking can bring to your game.

And in this blog post, I will show how to configure it with Google Tag Manager.

• First, we’ll start with basic conversions.
• Then we’ll see how to send conversions with values (e.g., purchase revenue)
• And also, we will take a quick look at Google Ads conversions vs.
• Importing Google Goals.

– Hide table of contents –

• What is a conversion in general?
• A basic setup of Google Ads Conversion Tracking with GTM
  • What if you don’t see the GTM option in Google Ads?
  • Create a tag in Google Tag Manager
  • Let’s test
  • Publish changes
• Track Google Ads Conversions with Dynamic Values
  • Let’s test
  • Publish changes
• When will my Google Ads conversions be marked as verified?
• Where can I see conversion data in Google Ads reports?
• Should I track conversions directly with the Google Ads tag, or should I import conversions from GA?
• Server-side Google Ads conversion tracking with GTM
• Final words

 

Before you continue

This blog post assumes you have a working knowledge of Google Tag Manager tags. If you’re a beginner, I recommend starting here.

Want to be up and running much faster? Take a look at my GTM masterclass for beginners.

The minimum requirements for you to continue with this article are:

• You have a Google Tag Manager tracking code installed on your website.
• You know what tags, triggers, variables, and dataLayer are and how they work in Google Tag Manager.

 

Video tutorial

If you prefer video format, here is a tutorial from my Youtube Channel.

 

What is a conversion in general?

Some of my readers who land on this page might be entirely new to conversions. So if you are one of them, here’s a quick introduction. But if you already know what conversions are, feel free to skip to the next chapter of this blog post.

A conversion is a meaningful interaction you want your visitors/users to complete. These conversions are the business goals you want to achieve through your website. They can further be split into micro and macro conversions. An example of a micro-conversion can be a newsletter subscription.

Why is a newsletter subscription a micro-conversion? Because it puts your user one step closer to a macro conversion (e.g., buying a product from your email). Micro conversions lead up to the main (macro) conversion.

Macro-conversions are the most important interactions, such as a purchase.

By tracking conversions, you can better understand what is working for your business and what isn’t. For example, you can create a segment of your users who have made a purchase and then try to understand what they are doing, their behavior, etc.

Furthermore, you can use conversions to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and then redistribute your advertising budget.

Hopefully, this super-brief introduction gave you a better understanding of this concept.

Now, let’s learn how to track conversions with Google Ads and Google Tag Manager.

 

A basic setup of Google Ads Conversion Tracking with Google Tag Manager

Let’s say that I have a newsletter subscription form on a website. I want to send data back to Google Ads whenever someone successfully submits it.

First, let’s create a conversion in Google Ads. Log into your ads account at ads.google.com account and go to Tools > Measurement > Conversions. Then, click the big plus icon.

The window will ask you to select the conversions you want to track. Since I am dealing with a website, I choose Website.

The Google Ads screen will now ask you to enter your website’s URL to look at how it is set up for ads.

Enter your domain and click on Scan. Once done, you will see a bunch of different settings.

The first one will be to automatically import conversions based on the website events you have set up. If you have done this through GA4, you can directly import it here as a conversion.

The second option (and the one I prefer) is to set the conversion actions manually.

Let us proceed with tracking the newsletter subscription manually. Click on the “+Add a conversion action manually” to open up a new window. Enter the following settings:

• Goal and Action Optimization: Select the Subscribe option from the dropdown menu. If you are tracking a different action (not a newsletter subscription), choose another action (the one that matches your needs the best).
• Conversion name: Subscribe form (but you can name it whatever you want)
• Value of each conversion: This can vary depending on the website’s objective. You may have a fixed value for every reader subscribing to your newsletter. But for an ecommerce website, the value of each purchase can vary. Since we are tracking newsletter signups, I will assign a fixed value of €5. Just follow the screenshot below.

• Count: This is an important field to consider. Google Ads uses the count to identify the correct number of conversions on the website after a user arrives through the ad.

For ecommerce purchases, every purchase should have a separate count, even if they are of the same product. But if the same user comes and subscribes to your newsletter twice, that would be a duplication of data. Counting this as two conversions would be wrong. So here, let’s select the count as one.

• All the other settings can be left as is. If you want to know how they differ in ad performance, click on Learn More.

Click Save and Continue. You will now be redirected to a page that shows the different ways to implement this conversion tracking on your website. To no one’s surprise, here at Analytics Mania, I select Use Google Tag Manager.

Then you will see two values, Conversion ID and Conversion label. You will need both of them in Google Tag Manager.

 

What if you don’t see the Google Tag Manager option in Google Ads?

Sometimes I get comments/questions that people don’t see the “Use Google Tag Manager” option in the Google Ads interface. Lately, Google has been changing its interface a lot, and for some reason, the GTM option sometimes disappears.

Anyway, it’s somewhere there. So keep browsing the interface until you find it.

But if you still get stuck, here’s a workaround. Select the “Install the that yourself” option.

Then scroll down to the “Event snippet” section.

The value of the “send_to” parameter will contain a value looking something like this: AW-XXXXX/YYYYYYYY. The values are different in each account/conversion.

The XXX part (after AW- but before the slash is the conversion ID). The YYY part (after the slash but before the single quote sign) is the Conversion Label.

Example: AW-2378765/aBcDeFg. 2378765 is the conversion ID, and aBcDeFg is the conversion label.

You will need to use these two values in the next chapter of this blog post.

 

Create a tag in Google Tag Manager

Let’s go to Google Tag Manager. Select Tags > New. In the Tag Configuration window, select Google Ads Conversion Tracking. Then enter the Conversion ID and Conversion label in their respective fields.

Did you notice the warning “Conversion Linker tag missing in container”? The conversion linker tag is important because it stores the ad click information when a conversion happens on your website.

Click on Create right next to the warning sign, which will open the template for the conversion linker. There’s no need to make other changes except making sure it is set to for on All Page Views.

No additional configuration is needed if you are dealing with one domain. Save the tag.

If you are dealing with multiple domains and want to track the visitor across domains, you should click Enable linking across domains and enter domains of all websites that are part of the same user journey. Separate them with commas.

Now, back to the Google Ads Conversion Tag. We need to configure when the tag fires. This depends on the kind of interaction you want to track. There is no simple and universal rule.

In my example of the Subscribe form, I have asked a developer to push an event emailSubscriber to the data layer when the form is successfully submitted.

Since emailSubscriber is sent via datalayer.push, the ideal trigger type for this conversion would be the Custom Event trigger.

Click on the Plus button in the Triggering section and select Custom Event trigger type. Enter the following settings:

I entered emailSubscriber (with an uppercase S) because that is the event that a developer pushed to the data layer. Save the trigger (it will be added automatically to the tag). Save the Google Ads tag.

P.S. If you want to learn how to track various interactions (including a bunch of different forms), take a look at my GTM course for beginners.

The final configuration of your Google Ads conversion tag should look like this.

 

Let’s test

In this step, we will use two things to test the setup: GTM’s Preview & Debug mode and a Chrome Extension called Google Tag Assistant (Legacy). If you haven’t done that yet, install the extension.

To enable Google Tag Manager Debug mode, click the Preview button in the top right corner of your GTM interface (near Submit button).

A new browser tab will open with tagassistant.google.com; if it does not, read this guide.

A popup will ask you to enter the URL you want to test and debug. It might be the address of a homepage, or it might be a specific page’s URL. Then press Start.

A new browser window should appear where you will see the URL you entered in the previous popup. At the bottom of that page/tab, you must visit the following badge:

And if you go back to the tagassistant.google.com tab, you must see this success message.

Read this article if you don’t see the success message or if the preview badge shows that the debugger is not connected.

Click Continue in the Preview mode. Go back to the website, click the Google Tag Assistant (Legacy) icon, and click Enable.

Now, let’s proceed with submitting the form on your website. After that, I should see the emailSubscriber event on the left side of the preview and debug mode. Once I click it, I should see that the tag has fired.

Let us confirm this with the Google Tag Assistant (Legacy) extension. Head to the website, click the Google Tag Assistant Legacy icon and check if the extension has identified the Google Ads Conversion Tag. If yes, then click it.

P.S. Ignore two identical GTM containers displayed in the extension. The extension records two containers because of the GTM preview mode (learn more).

Then you will see the conversion ID and conversion label sent to Google Ads.

 

Publish changes

All good? You can now publish your Google Tag Manager container changes, and this tag will go live for all your website visitors. You can publish the container by clicking the Submit button in the top-right corner of the GTM interface and then clicking Publish.

If you want to learn where to check the incoming data in Google Ads, skip to this chapter.

 

Track Google Ads Conversions with Dynamic Values

As promised, in this next part of the article, I will show you how to take your Google Ads conversion tracking one step further and send dynamic values to Google.

Sending dynamic values to Google Ads is especially useful for ecommerce sites because it helps quickly identify the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

For example, did someone purchase an item for $50? Great! Send that value to Google Ads. Then Google can show in the reports how much money each ad/campaign has earned for your business.

I asked a developer to create a new datalayer.push event called purchase every time someone successfully purchases a product from my website. This push function will also contain the product’s price before taxes and the currency.

Since I want to use it in Google Tag Manager, I must create another DataLayer Variable. In GTM, go to Variables > New > Data Layer Variable and enter the following settings:

I entered ecommerce.value because that’s the exact name of the key stored in the Data Layer.

Now let’s insert that variable in the previously created Google Ads tag’s Conversion Value field. If your business operates in a single currency, enter that currency’s code in the Currency Code field. So, for example, US dollars should be USD, euros should be EUR, etc.

Save the tag.

If your business operates in multiple currencies, you could ask a developer to push the currency code to the data layer the way they did with the value. Then, you would have to create another Data Layer variable and insert it in a tag.

 

Let’s test

To enable (or refresh) Google Tag Manager Debug mode, click the Preview button in the top right corner of your GTM interface (near Submit button).

Then go back to the website, click the Google Tag Assistant (Legacy) icon, and click Enable (if you haven’t done that yet).

Make a test purchase. Check the Preview window to see if the website successfully pushed the purchase event. If you have set up the trigger correctly, the corresponding Google Ads tag should fire, like in the screenshot below.

Also, go back to the website and click the Google Tag Assistant Legacy icon once again to check if the extension spotted the Google Ads Conversion Tag. Click it.

Here, you should see the values sent back to Google Ads, i.e., conversion ID, conversion label, conversion value, and currency.

 

Publish changes

All good? You can now publish your Google Tag Manager container changes, and this tag will go live for all your website visitors. Click the Submit button in the top-right corner of the GTM interface and then click Publish.

Continue reading if you want to learn where to check the incoming data in Google Ads.

 

When will my Google Ads conversions be marked as verified?

It might take 24 hours to see your conversion as “verified” in the list of all conversions. So don’t worry if you still see it as unverified.

Also, you need to click on your live Google ads to register in the Conversions window.

 

Where can I see conversion data in Google Ads reports?

There are various reports in Google Ads. So, you can see your conversion data in the Campaign reports, the standalone Conversions window, etc.

In the Campaigns window, you’ll see a table of active and inactive campaigns there. One of the columns there is Conversions. Every time a conversion tag in GTM fires (when a visitor has clicked one of your ads before), it will send the conversion details to that column (of course, the counting method depends on your conversion settings).

You’ll need to customize the report if you are also sending conversion values. Go to Columns > Modify Columns.

….and then select Conv. Value. An additional column will now be added to the dashboard, showing the value each ad/ campaign brings to your business.

 

Should I track conversions directly with the Google Ads tag, or should I import conversions from Google Analytics?

There is no direct answer to that. I cover this briefly in the video below. Start at 12:39.

Watch the video and make your own decision.

 

Server-side Google Ads conversion tracking with GTM

Recently, Google introduced a new way of tracking conversions with Google Ads by sending it with server-side Google Tag Manager. If you want to learn how to configure it, I explain this in my intermediate/advanced Google Tag Manager course.

 

Google Ads conversion tracking: Final words

To sum up, the Google Ads conversion tracking process looks like this:

• If you haven’t yet, create the Conversion Linker tag (include all the domains in the tag’s settings if cross-domain tracking is involved)
• Implement Google Ads conversion tracking directly with Google Ads tags
• If you want, you can additionally implement goal import from Google Analytics. Ensure you don’t show them in the “conversions” column; otherwise, some can get reported twice.
• Send conversion values as well. This will enrich your reports and give better signals to Google’s machine-learning algorithms working in the background. I am not a Google Ads specialist, thus cannot show you a lot of tips on that part.

Here’s a bonus tip I didn’t mention before in this article. If you send purchase data as conversions to Google Ads and have a transaction ID in the data layer, send it to Google too.

Doing so will help you prevent duplicate transactions. If multiple conversions with the same Order ID (a.k.a. Transaction ID) are sent back to Google Ads, it will count only the first one (all others will be ignored).