Six Common Mistakes You Must Avoid

I have managed to take over many Google Ads accounts. The biggest problem I found is that conversions are not being tracked correctly or at all. This makes it difficult to see what’s working.

Here are some suggestions to help you fix the conversion tracking issues in Google Ads.

Six common Google Ads conversion tracking errors to avoid

Here’s a guide to Google Ads conversion tracking. There is also a post about conversion tracking hangups which can hinder your ability to set it up correctly. We’ll be discussing the mistakes that advertisers can make after they have set up Google Ads conversion tracking. Are Set up. Because they do not come with error messages, these are very difficult to identify. Lucky for you, we have your back so you avoid misleading or inaccurate data reporting.

1. Conversion tracking is not available

Yes. I do. This one is kinda cheating.

It is quite obvious. It’s obvious that conversion tracking is not set up.

This one’s also easy: set up conversion tracking.

Maybe you should finish this article before that happens. I hope to be able help you with some of your problems.

2. All conversions not being tracked

Even though best practices suggest that each page should contain one conversion action per page, I find landing pages with several conversion points.

You could take any number of steps.

• Demo request form
• Get in touch with us
• Download gated whitepaper/content
• Purchase
• Talk to a chatbot
• Book an appointment
• Get a return call
• Phone

Users can find your main site no matter what they ask on your landing page. All the call to action on your website are important. Do you track them all?

You can select a category to which the conversion action belongs when you create it in Google Ads. You can use these categories as prompts to start thinking about the many ways your users might interact with you. Once you have done that, you can ensure you track them all.

You might expect someone to purchase the product or request a demo. However, it wouldn’t be wise not to include any other actions as conversions given their potential intent.

3. Not-conversion events can be tracked as conversions

You should also avoid tracking actions that aren’t of any value to your business. The list that I provided above is pretty long. However, it doesn’t contain things such as:

• Page views
• Social media icon clicks
• Video Views
• Time on site triggers
• Download ungated content
• Sending a Help ticket
• Contacting customer service

These stats are valuable, and they may be helpful to keep track of, but not conversion-worthy.

This is how it usually happens. A company employee identifies an action or page as valuable, and most likely to result in a conversion. This is a sign of user quality. If someone suggests that it should be converted, Bob’s your uncle. We track people who view FAQs pages in the same manner we track demo requests.

My uncle Bob is a marketing professional. He knows that false positives can be dangerous and could cause you to lose money. Each call to action should be evaluated for its actual value before you decide what conversions are appropriate.

If there is a lot of resistance to one of these actions, and people really want it for a conversion purpose, you can set it up like that, but it will be considered a secondary activity. It means that you can do two things.

• All Conv. will include the conversion. Not Conversions, but the All Conv. column.
• Smart Bidding will not consider this action a success, and it won’t optimise for them.

4. It is important to track all conversion events equally.

Okay, now you know that you can only have true conversion events in primary status. But you are treating all of them equally. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, there could be an issue.

Let’s go over the previous list:

• Demo request form
• Get in touch with us
• Get a gated whitepaper/content
• Purchase
• Talk to a chatbot
• Book an appointment
• Get a return call
• Phone

Each of these conversions may seem like a different one, but they aren’t all the same quality. A demo request form filled out by someone is likely to be less qualified than one who calls your company. The person who booked an appointment probably isn’t as qualified as the one who made a purchase. Even better, two people who made purchases could have purchased orders of different value and margins. This can impact overall ROAS in a way that is unique.

This is easier for ecommerce businesses. To calculate ROAS for your optimization campaigns, you should collect your revenue and conversion data.

Lead generation is more challenging, however, it can still be worthwhile. If dynamic values are not possible for any conversion actions, the default settings can be used. Find a scale that works for you, and then determine different values for each action. Perhaps a content request for demo is valued at $250 and a download of the material is $10.

Whatever your scale, now you can track all actions and use Conv Value and Cost/Conv Val columns to figure the value of each lead you generate.

5. For lead generation, track “every” conversion

A buyer can make five purchases on an online ecommerce site. This means that their lifetime worth will rise because they have revenue associated with each of them. That’s simple.

Different approaches to lead generation are possible. You won’t receive 15x as many leads if the same person submits the exact information 15 times. You really only have one lead. Your conversion column data should reflect that.

You have the option to choose whether you would like tracking at every interval. You’ll select Every for ecommerce. For lead generation, you should pick One to ensure that only one submission is being tracked for each user. This avoids double or triple counting (or worse), which could again result in a false positive.

6. Calls of extremely short duration are tracked by phone tracking

You can use Google Ads to monitor calls if they are made from a Google forwarding telephone number. They can also be used to track (or in some cases record) calls made from extensions or your call assets (formerly called Extensions). It allows businesses to easily track how many calls their ads generate and tie it back to the keywords and campaigns that triggered them.

Problem is when all phone calls are being monitored. Every call is different, as any person who has made phone calls will tell you.

As you can see, some calls take as long as 28 minutes (1.701 seconds) while others only take six seconds. Are they to be treated differently? It seems unlikely.

Most businesses will consider a sale or lead to be a conversion when they use Google Ads. To get those kinds of actions, you will need to spend a certain amount of time on the phone. It is necessary that they share either their payment information or personal contact information. These usually require a little bit of time.

This error is a serious one. I urge you to try a few things but not more than one.

To start, it would be great if you spoke to your call center/sales team members and got an indication of how many calls are actually generating business. It might be worth not counting calls to convert phone calls.

Next, ask them for information about how long it takes to get payment or your personal data on the telephone. Are these calls lasting 30-60 seconds, 60 or 90 seconds on average? Longer? You can go for longer.

This is how to avoid making these mistakes in conversion tracking

Unfortunately, “Some conversion tracking is more effective than none,” is not always the truth. It’s always better to put in effort but there are mistakes that could be more misleading than no tracking. This list should help you to check the quality of your conversion tracking so that you can ensure you are optimizing with clean data.

1. Conversion tracking is not available
2. All conversions not being tracked
3. It is important to track all conversion events equally.
4. Not-conversion events can be tracked as conversions
5. For lead generation, track “every” conversion
6. Calls of extremely short duration are tracked by phone tracking