When a new user clicks at your Google ads and lands at your website, this can be considered as the initial engagement of this particular user with your website.
But what were this user’s next actions taken while navigating your website?
Knowing your visitors behaviour and interaction with your website is vital so as to be able to accurately evaluate your Google ads performance.
Speaking about possible user actions, a selection of these could be:
- Visiting a specific landing page
- Subscribing to your newsletter
- Downloading a file
- Using your site’s search bar in order to find specific products
The question that arises is how you should know which of these actions can be considered as micro-conversions. And the answer lies in the following question:
Which of these actions could be contributing to the reinforcement of your major KPIs as well as to leading your user down to the sales funnel (from ToFu / MoFu to BoFU)?
Micro-conversions should be considered as the first valued actions, able to guide you into segmenting your visitors to your potential macro-converters (i.e. customers).
So, for as long as Google allows us to manage our own custom conversions, we will!
If you are still not tracking your google ads properly, keep on reading!
The example presented in order for you to be able to comprehend this process, is related to Tracking Pageviews of Special Interest Pages. These could be specific landing pages, bonded with a particular content trait, for instance a group of pages that are related to the same category, or the same product / course/ service page.
Required steps to be taken, include the creation of:
- New conversion action creation
- Google ads conversion tag in google tag manager [prerequisite]
New conversion action creation
Firstly, you should create a new conversion action.
At the “Tools and Settings” menu of your Google ads account, under the “Measurement” section, click at the “Conversions” tab.
Then click the “new conversion action” button at the top left corner.
The following interface should appear. Click at the “Website” option
This option suits you in the case of aiming to track website actions, as the ones mentioned below
Enter the domain url in question, in the related field
Keep in mind that, in case your Google Analytics account is linked with Google Ads, you’ll be prompted to import existing events from Google Analytics.
Still, you may ignore that, if it’s not applicable.
Scroll down the page and click at the “+ Add conversion action manually”
In the “Goal and action optimization” section, click at the drop down menu and select the “Page View” option:
Give an appropriate conversion name
Add value that will be related to each Pageview conversion.
Bear in mind that, applying a higher value in micro-conversions, could be misleading for your data analysis.
Micro-conversions’ evaluation is recommended to be set to lower values (as in the example below, 0.01€)
In the case of “Pageviews” tracking, it makes sense to track every conversion made by your visitors, so this option should be selected.
At the “Click-through conversion window”, choose the option that best relates to your customer’s journey time acquisition characteristics.
You should take into consideration, the time required in order for a customer currently being at ToFu, to be going down to BoFu and ultimately become a customer.
In this example, we opted for “30 days” conversion window, but depending on the industry / product / service, this could vary a lot.
The “Engaged-view conversion window” option, is related to your video ads engagement, and should be considered in the same way as the previous conversion window setting.
However, in this case, conversion window is probably set to a shorter time period compared to the “Click-through conversion window”.
The “View-through conversion window” should be examined having the same mindset as the previously mentioned cases.
Then, you should choose the attribution model applied for this particular conversion.
The “data-driven” attribution model is recommended by Google.
Attribution Model
Learn More about Attribution Models ->
Google Ads Help: About attribution models
Be careful after choosing the attribution model and before clicking the “Done” button, Google has enabled by default the “enhanced CPC” bidding strategy.
Although, it is stated that you can adjust your bid strategy separately at your campaigns’ settings, you can opt out of this, in the case of it being irrelevant to your bidding plan.
After saving your conversion action, you’ll have to manually install your Google ads Conversion Tracking tag.
There are 3 available options:
- Hardcoding installation of Gtag
- Email Gtag to your developer
- Install Gtag using Google Tag Manager (this option will be presented in this article)
When you opt for Google Tag Manager installation, the following window will appear, providing you with the required IDs for your Tagging set up.
Google ads conversion tag in google tag manager [prerequisite]
To set up the Google ads Conversion Tracking tag for Pageviews of Special Interest Pages, you should follow the procedure described below.
Login to your Google Tag Manager account and go to the “Tags” section.
Then, click at the “New” button at the top right corner and after having clicked at the Tag Configuration field, choose the Google ads Conversion Tracking tag.
The following set up window will appear.
At the “Conversion ID” and “Conversion Label” fields, you should fill in the information given by Google ads at the completion of the conversion action saving process.
Leave the rest of the options as they are set by default.
Next, click at the Trigger Configuration field and choose the “Page View” trigger option.
You should opt for the “Some Page Views” case, in order for Google ads conversion tag to be triggered only on specific urls.
At this point, it should be pointed out that, in the case of the tag being triggered on multiple urls (as shown in the picture below), one should choose the “matches RegEx” option.
This clarification is made, to save you time, in case someone would choose the “contains” option (instead of the “matches RegEx”) and click the “+” sign, having the impression that in this way, the set up would include either of the x amount of page urls entered.
Well, the case is that, the “+” sign, works with the “AND” conditions set up, meaning that all of the conditions entered, should be true in order for the tag to be triggered.
Discovering this possible error, occurred simply by making it out of sheer momentum!
(Google makes a clarification on this set up as shown above, but the font size used is really -I mean reaaaally- small!!)
Save your tag and you are all set up!
Do not forget to test your tags’ triggering via the Google Tag Assistant by clicking on the “Preview” button at the top right corner of your GTM account interface.
After having ensured that all tags work properly, go on and click the submit button in order for your Google ads Conversion Tracking tag to go live!