The Importance of Measuring Success in Google Ads
The greatest mistake a business owner, marketing manager, or even a professional Google Ads manager can make when working with Google Ads is not having some way to track the success of the campaign. Because why should you run ads if you don't know if they're producing any customers? Too often success is measured based off of less relevant statistics like:
· Click through rate
· Average position
· Average cost per click
· Quality score
While these things are important, they do not actually show you whether or not your campaign is succeeding at driving new customers to your business. This is why you have to have some type of conversion tracking to make sure that your Google Ads campaigns are producing phone calls to your office, request forms filled out on your website, or products sold. There are two simple tracking options that can seamlessly integrate with Google Ads – Google tracking codes and Google Analytics goals.
Google Tracking Codes
One type of conversion tracking is actually built right into Google Ads and simply requires you to put a small amount of code right into your website. This is found in the Conversion section of Google Ads. The code can be used to track calls that come to your website, calls to you directly from your ads, and when somebody clicks submit on a form. To find this in Google Ads you click the Tools in the top right corner and then click on Conversions under Measurement.
Once you are on the Conversion Actions screen you can choose what sort of action you want to set up Conversions for. Most websites will want to focus on the Website and Phone Calls. If you are using Google Analytics (see below) you can import your Goals into Google Ads by going to the Import section
While inserting code into your website can sound a little scary, it is actually fairly easy, and if you have a web administrator, they should be able to help you out with the process of getting this code installed on your website. If you are a do-it-yourselfer then you will want to copy the code from Google Ads and paste it in between the <head> and </head> of your website. Here are some help files for some of the larger website platforms:
WordPress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/head/
Squarespace: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205815908-Using-Code-Injection
Wix: https://support.wix.com/en/article/verifying-your-site-using-header-codes
Google Analytics Goals
The other type of tracking we use often as part of Google Ads campaigns is setting goals in Google Analytics. In Google Analytics, you can set all kinds of goals such as:
· If a customer made it to a specific page on your site like your contact us page or a thanks page for a form on your website.
· You can count phone calls that come in from third-party call tracking services such as CallTrackingMetrics or Call Rail.
· You can also track how long people are on your site and keep track of how many different pages users visit
Google Analytics Goals are a great way to measure a wide variety of results, and flexibly adjust tracking to reflect your changing business goals. Once you have set up your Goals you can then import them into Google Ads (see above).
To get to the Goals section of Google Analytics you will want to click on the Admin (Gear Icon) in the bottom left corner. Also, make sure you connect your Google Analytics account to Google Ads. Take a look below for where you can find the Google Ads Linking & Goals sections in the Admin screen of Analytics.
