How to track conversions in Google Ads - Zephyra Studio

Without conversion tracking, Google Ads optimises towards people who click most often, and a click is not the same as an enquiry or a purchase. There are three ways to fix that, in rising order of accuracy: counting visits to a destination page, sending an event from the site, and importing conversions from Google Analytics. The first is the crudest and only works as a stopgap until the real thing is in place. For most small businesses the right choice is an on-site event, because it ties to a specific action rather than to how someone arrived. Tracking is set up once, and then checked regularly, because tags break quietly the moment the site changes.

What counts as a conversion and what does not

A conversion is an action that is worth money or leads to it: a submitted form, a call, a completed purchase, a quote request. A banner click, time on page and three page views are not conversions but behaviour, and mixing the two is the fastest way to spend the budget on the wrong audience.

In Google Ads every action is marked as primary or secondary. Primary actions feed the conversions column and the optimisation, while secondary ones are measured but do not influence who sees the ads. That rule is useful: keep primary actions to one or three, and mark everything else as secondary.

If everything is primary, nothing is primary. The algorithm then looks for people who click often or watch for a long time, because those count as conversions too, and such people do not necessarily buy.

Three ways to set tracking up

They run from the easiest to the most accurate. The first is used when you have no access to the site code, the second is the standard, and the third suits sites whose analytics is already in good shape.

• Destination-based counting: the conversion is opening a confirmation page. It takes minutes and duplicates easily when several campaigns share the same page
• An on-site event through the Google tag or Google Tag Manager: it fires on form submission, a phone number click or a completed purchase
• Importing conversions from Google Analytics: used when events are already measured cleanly in analytics and imported into Ads as conversions

The order we follow when setting it up

The tag alone is not enough. What travels with it matters too, because campaign value is calculated from that data later.

• Agree which actions are primary, since every later decision builds on that one
• Create the event and the tag in the tag management tool, with a trigger on the specific action
• Mark the action as primary and record a value for it if purchases have variable prices
• Test in Tag Assistant before launching a campaign, because a mistake costs more afterwards
• Check the report a day after the campaign starts and after every change to the site

Settings and checks that change the number

The attribution model decides which click gets credited with a conversion. The default data-driven model spreads credit across touchpoints, which is reasonable for most businesses, but it changes the numbers compared with older models, so history before and after is not compared casually.

The conversion window, meaning how long after a click an action is still credited, defaults to thirty days for clicks. For services with a longer decision cycle it is extended, and for impulse purchases it is shortened.

Duplicates are the most common source of fake numbers. If the same form is measured both by an on-site tag and by an analytics import, the report shows two enquiries for one submitted request. Other frequent mistakes: opening the confirmation page directly, reloading the same form, and counting the wrong event fired during validation. On sites where ads and analytics are connected, it pays to read our article on linking GA4 and Google Ads first, because that prevents double counting.

Conversions advertising never sees

Some jobs never happen on the site. Someone calls, a meeting is arranged, a quote is sent and the job closes weeks later, while the advertising report shows a visit without a conversion. The budget is then cut from the channel that actually works, because only what happened in the same moment is being measured.

That is why enquiries belong in a record, with a note of where they came from and what they turned into. Once a job closes, that outcome goes back into advertising as a conversion, which shows the algorithm what a customer is really worth.

Importing closed jobs is done from your own record or from a contact management system, as a file or through a connection. The condition is that the identifier from the ad was stored with each click, because without it the job cannot be attributed to a campaign.

With longer decision cycles it also helps to measure intermediate steps visible on the site, such as viewing a price list or downloading a brochure, as secondary conversions. That shows someone entered the consideration stage even when the job does not close in the same month.

Once closed jobs are included in the calculation, the picture changes. A channel that looked expensive per enquiry can turn out to be the most profitable per job, while the one with cheap enquiries may bring enquiries that never become work.

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Key takeaways

• Without conversions Google Ads optimises for clicks, and a click is not a customer.
• Keep primary conversions to one or three; everything else belongs in secondary.
• An on-site event is more accurate than destination counting, but it needs code access and testing.
• Double counting the same action is the most common reason the conversion count does not match the enquiries you receive.
• Checking after every site change is part of the job, because tags break quietly.

Conclusion

Conversion tracking is the only way to point the budget at the people who actually leave an enquiry rather than at the ones who merely click. If the conversion count does not match the enquiries in your inbox, a duplicate or a wrongly marked primary action is usually behind it, and that is the first thing to fix. Our Google Ads service covers setting tracking up as well, because without it there is no basis for deciding how much budget each ad deserves.