PPC Essentials Part 4: Conversion Tracking—A Guide to Optimizing Your PPC Strategy

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Today I am joined by our resident digital marketing genius, Garrett Cregan, and we're going to talk all about conversion tracking. I'm excited to jump into it. How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Doing awesome, thank you. Super excited for today's episode. We are talking all about... this is part four out of probably eight parts. Let's see if we have a bonus for essential pieces of PPC in the real estate investment industry. Anyway, the topic for today is conversion tracking. It is the most technical topic that we have, I think, and it's something that in a lot of the audits that we do, we see people doing wrong. So there's definitely a lot of room to improve here. Let's start out just by talking about what conversion tracking is and why it matters."

"Yeah, so everything in an ad account comes down to the data that we feed the platform, and if we aren't able to give it good, accurate data, it's not going to be able to give us good, accurate results. When we say tracking, what we mean is the ability to record and report back to the platform what people do on the site after they first engage with your ad."

"Yeah, absolutely. There's this... if anybody's not familiar, if you go on Google Ads, you see this 'Conversions' column. That's kind of the results of conversion tracking, right? That's where all the information goes in. And there are a few common mistakes here for sure. Is there anything that you want to bring up that you're seeing as well? Should we talk about how this actually works first, just technically how people know it?"

"I think there's some misconceptions on this too. I think people just assume like everything that comes through a form is tracked as a conversion or something like that, but this is all for the most part... well, there are multiple ways, but largely, this is mostly cookie-based. The way that it works is you fire a JavaScript snippet when something happens, and that kind of communicates to Google. It really works the same way with Facebook. That communicates 'our event that has value to us happened.'"

Here's the first part of the text with grammatical corrections, proper capitalization, punctuation marks, and dialogue formatting:

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Today I am joined by our resident digital marketing genius, Garrett Cregan, and we're going to talk all about conversion tracking. I'm excited to jump into it. How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Doing awesome, thank you. Super excited for today's episode. We are talking all about... this is part four out of probably eight parts. Let's see if we have a bonus for essential pieces of PPC in the real estate investment industry. Anyway, the topic for today is conversion tracking. It is the most technical topic that we have, I think, and it's something that in a lot of the audits that we do, we see people doing wrong. So there's definitely a lot of room to improve here. Let's start out just by talking about what conversion tracking is and why it matters."

"Yeah, so everything in an ad account comes down to the data that we feed the platform, and if we aren't able to give it good, accurate data, it's not going to be able to give us good, accurate results. When we say tracking, what we mean is the ability to record and report back to the platform what people do on the site after they first engage with your ad."

"Yeah, absolutely. There's this... if anybody's not familiar, if you go on Google Ads, you see this 'Conversions' column. That's kind of the results of conversion tracking, right? That's where all the information goes in. And there are a few common mistakes here for sure. Is there anything that you want to bring up that you're seeing as well? Should we talk about how this actually works first, just technically how people know it?"

"I think there's some misconceptions on this too. I think people just assume like everything that comes through a form is tracked as a conversion or something like that, but this is all for the most part... well, there are multiple ways, but largely, this is mostly cookie-based. The way that it works is you fire a JavaScript snippet when something happens, and that kind of communicates to Google. It really works the same way with Facebook. That communicates 'our event that has value to us happened.'"

"A lot of people just put that code on the page after their form, for example. So someone fills out a form and then they go to this thank you page, and on that thank you page you have this conversion tracking code that says, 'This was a lead.' The way that it has to work is the ad platform, like... this tracking, it's built for even e-commerce scenarios, for example, where someone could click on an ad, go to the website, go around a whole bunch of different pages on the website, leave for two days, come back, buy something, and you would be able to track it. Because the JavaScript basically tracks: did they click on an ad and then convert within a certain time period?"

"So there's something called an attribution window. If it converts within that time period, then it's there. So a common misconception is that like a test lead going through your form, for example, would mess up your conversion tracking, which isn't really true. It wouldn't count extra conversions. It really just is that someone has to click an ad, and then you have to fire this code for them. As long as that happens within the time period, which I think we set by default at 30 days after clicks, it counts as a lead."

"All right, so common mistakes with this. What are you seeing?"

"I think the most egregious error is just not tracking at all. That makes my... that's just gross and it's just a waste of ad spend. And that's harmful because if things aren't being tracked, then we have no idea what's working at all. It's not even like we don't know what's bringing in good or bad quality, we're just totally blind, just giving money and burning it at the altar of Google. And that's just not gonna work at all."

"Yeah, and so when it comes to tracking and not tracking, just some things I've noticed for why people do this: either they don't know what they don't know, you know? It's not set up right or something. So you really have to test this, and my favorite way is to use something called Google Tag Manager. You could set it up, you could test that things are firing properly, and then you just have to be attentive to your account. You have to realize if things aren't tracking. It's not uncommon at all for conversion tracking to break at some point, and you have to be aware and realize that conversion tracking broke and that's going to create issues for you."

"So I think that's probably the most common thing that I see is people try to set it up, but it just doesn't work for whatever reason. And there's tons of little reasons, but you kind of have to at least be aware that it's not working."

"Yeah, and that's... it's probably unhelpful also to like go into how you can make sure that it isn't tracking. So what I do usually, or what I would advise doing, is have your form submissions go into, like, ideally, your CRM. And it's easiest if you just compare the lead count in your CRM with the platform, and they should be pretty close to equal numbers. If there's a difference, I would go through your tracking and make sure that all of the code is in the right place, it hasn't changed, that the form is going to the same thank you page that it used to, you know, all those things. But if those numbers don't match up, that's probably a pretty good indicator that your tracking isn't working anymore."

"Yeah, absolutely. Totally agreed with that. All right, what else in terms of big mistakes?"

"I think one other thing is, so when you first make an ad account in Google, it tries to like have you make what it calls smart goals to like track things automatically like page views, button clicks for like calls, those kinds of things. And those... like yes, having those track does help you know how people are behaving on the site, but they don't show much intent. And so that's gonna give Google some false positives that it's doing well. So a big issue I see is with people over-tracking things that are too early in the buying journey to actually be meaningful."

"Yeah, another example kind of similar to that is duplicated tracking. You have multiple things set up, they track at the same time, and a really easy way to see this is you look on a graph of all your conversion actions separated by day, and you can see that there's certain conversion actions that always fire at the same time. It's a good sign of duplication. Or you look at your search terms and you see where you have like one click and two conversions, and you think, 'How did I get two leads from one person?'"

"When you have unique... this is something to talk about too in terms of conversion tracking. You can make it so there should only be one conversion per person, and theoretically, if someone fills out your form 100 times, if you tell Google in the settings that you only want to count one per person, then it should only count one unless you had duplicated tracking somehow."

"Another little thing that this brings up in my mind too is, let's just say you have one of these problems and you do have a lot of duplication, or you had smart goals running for a period of time because Google will even turn this stuff on without you unless you actually turn off the setting that allows Google to automatically turn on the setting if they want to. Specifically to keep in mind with Google, oftentimes you have to turn off what you don't want and then you also have to turn off Google's ability to turn it back on without your consent later, because they just love to ruin your results. But what can you do if something like that happens? You realize you stop tracking for a period of time or you way over-tracked?"

"Well, first things first, I would get it fixed as fast as possible. And then there are ways to teach Google that a certain time period had incorrect tracking, so it won't take that into account as it builds out your account's learnings. It'll say, 'Okay, here's how people behave with this account, but we won't take into consideration this time period because it had bad data.' So that's one way. And then you also can upload leads from your CRM right into the ad account if there was a gap in tracking. That can help you to bridge the gap of under-counting."

"I understand. If anybody needs to look it up, what is this called? Is it called like a data exclusion period or something like that?"

"Yeah, it'll be like that."

"All right, so you can look that up, and Google has help articles. It's not super difficult to do, it's pretty easy. All right, anything else that you're seeing commonly in terms of mistakes? I have one idea that just came to mind, and it's that a lot of people don't understand the difference between a primary conversion action and a secondary conversion action. And this is basically where you designate to Google: is this something I want to optimize towards, or is it just something I want to track? A lot of people don't realize you can track as much stuff as you... you can track those smart goals, you could track different types of conversion actions, all that stuff. The main thing is you just only want to set things as primary conversion actions if they actually have value for you and that's what you've chosen to track."

"Yeah, just to go into that a bit deeper, so like you said, we only want to count things as primary if they are actually... if the action that they're measuring is an action that you care about as a business owner. For instance, like sure, it's great if this user spent an hour on your site, but like, did they submit a form? Of those two actions, I don't care about their time on the page, I care about the form. So I would only set things as primary if they matter."

"But one thing that I also would add as a caveat is you don't want to track things that happen so rarely that Google is not going to be able to get a handle on that as an action. So this is going a little bit ahead, but you can import like contracts or deals, but it might not be beneficial to count that as a primary action right now, like when you're just starting, because those deals happen so rarely in most cases that it's going to kind of give Google a false negative. That's not an action that your audience takes, and so it kind of de-emphasizes it."

"Yeah, absolutely. You have to think that Google's looking at tens of thousands of data points and it's trying to optimize, and if you feed it something that happens once a month, it's going to have a really hard time optimizing towards that, right? You want that frequency of action. So there's always that fun game of how deep do you track in the funnel, and you can always kind of optimize that by primary and secondary actions, and you can track more than you actually optimize towards."

"So let's talk about if everything's just good. Like, assuming conversion tracking is working exactly as it should for like your average person managing their own PPC or something like that, what does that look like? Basically, how do you do good enough?"

"Yeah, so it's basically doing what we talked about as bad and doing it good. So having forms count once, having them count accurately, having your primary actions be ones that matter. And then one other thing that we see really rarely that has a big impact is tracking phone calls. We see that calls are often very high-quality leads because they're high intent. They want to talk now, and they get on the phone with an agent immediately. There isn't that lag between the form and the context where they can call or like, you know, do other forms and kind of get distracted."

"And then if you answer your phone..."

"That's the caveat. You gotta answer your phone, people. But if you do, then yeah, you're right, it's guaranteed contact."

"Yeah, and calls are not a very... or call tracking is not a very intuitive or commonly known thing to track. It just doesn't really... it's easy to say, 'Oh, like on my site I have a form, I track that,' but it's kind of hard to think, 'Oh, I can track calls.' It isn't very intuitive, I think, for people, and so it's often missed as an action that can and needs to be tracked."

"Yeah, absolutely. So let's lay this out. I'm thinking most people should have at least three conversion actions, and I'll explain exactly what those are. The first one's forms, like you mentioned. The go-to here is just the direct leads, right? We talked about more advanced strategies like lead sculpting, and we'll talk in this episode about offline conversion tracking and all that stuff, but the baseline, right, you track your leads through the form. Super simple."

"Phone calls... a lot of people think they're tracking phone calls, but they're not fully tracking phone calls. And there's two different ways you could track it, and then we also have to understand what tracking means. The way a lot of people think about tracking phone calls is, 'I have a tracking number,' because Real Estate Investors love tracking numbers because they love to be able to say, 'I spent this much and I got these phone calls,' right? But the thing is, if that tracking number doesn't give information to Google about what's happening and be able to tie it back to a specific person, then it's not valuable."

"And if you just throw a phone number on the landing page, you don't know when those calls came in, which keyword the person clicked on... uh, but you don't click on keywords, but you get the point. You don't know which keyword they matched to, you don't know which ad they clicked, you don't know there are other audience characteristics. And if you don't know, the algorithm doesn't know, and it can't optimize towards those things."

"So this isn't just about having tracking numbers. This is about having tracking that works with Google, and there's two different types of call tracking, and you need both of them. The first one is called... it'll show up as 'calls from ads' is what it says with the conversion action because you should have in your Google account something called... I think they call them Assets now, not extensions."

"Yeah, in my mind it's called an ad extension. I think it's called an ad asset now. It's basically like these other little secondary things that can exist on your ad, and one of those is a click-to-call phone number where you can on your Google ad show a phone number there, and somebody can click to call there. And it'll cost the same amount for that as it does for a normal click, but then they're calling you right. So there's value there, and the way you track that is Google... do that automatically, no matter what you do, as long as you turn it on, right? But you don't do anything fancy."

"The hard thing is, let's just say they click there and they come to your landing page, and then they call the phone number that's on the landing page. How do you track that?"

"So there are a couple of platforms that we recommend using that are called call tracking softwares, where what they'll do is they'll look at where the click came from, whether it was from Facebook, from Google, from an organic search, from a referral, and based on the source of that click, it'll actually swap out the number on your page with the number that you've assigned to that source. And so when they call, they're calling that source's assigned number, not the base number that's on your page. And so by doing that, we know where they came from, and then we can record the whole call and then have that information passed back into the ad platform."

"And there's... yeah, I mean, there's different platforms that do this differently. Like Call Rail is one that's pretty popular in the industry that you can do this. You can use something called a dynamic number pool, and it'll make it so each person on your website at any given time has a different phone number that they're seeing. So then if someone calls, we know exactly which person they are, right? Because you won't have a different tracking number for every single possible combination of all UTM parameters and things like that that could exist for each click ID. You'd have a different... every single time someone clicked, you'd have a different phone number."

"So it's kind of like they have this rotating pool, and each moment a number could be assigned to something different. And then it can integrate with the ad platform. Right now, we use something called Call Tracking Metrics, and it does something similar but without needing quite as many phone numbers. And I honestly don't even understand exactly how it works, how it knows which person called, but it does, and it works. So that's... and you don't have as many phone numbers, which means you cut back on your spam calls a little bit and stuff like that. So that totally helps."

"And in some insight, form fills are valuable. Those calls from the ad extensions or ad assets or whatever you call them, those we find convert worse than form submissions because sometimes people just don't know what they're doing, they don't know who they're calling, you know? They haven't read a lot about your company. But they're cheap, so they're fine. The phone calls on the landing page, if they actually came from ads, which you have to remember, anytime you put a phone number out there on the internet, you're going to get spam calls for all kinds of different reasons, right? Bots will scrape it, telemarketers call your company, you know, robocalls and all that kind of stuff. And that could be stuff where you turn off your ads, if it still happens, it's just completely unrelated to your advertising."

"But if we look at the calls that actually came from ads, then those are our highest converting leads, even higher than form submissions. It's also the least common one for people to track. So it's really important to track that. So anyway, Call Tracking Metrics, Call Rail, both of those platforms you can do this. There might be others that we're just not familiar with. I don't know if you've ever used any other ones?"

"I know that there also are some CRMs that have their own built-in solution, but those are rare. And I think most people use those more out-of-the-box platforms that we mentioned because they're a bit more robust than the ones that are native to those platforms."

"All right, let's talk about how you... the way that we formatted all these episodes is you start with what's bad and what's good, then how do you do this really, really well, right? What's the best version of this?"

"I'll start with one note from my side. With calls, if you want to take that one step further, you also track based on call quality. So it has to be a certain length of a call or something like that, because you'll have a lot of calls that are just like one second ring time or something like that, or someone like clicks the number on accident, and then you track the conversion. So I think doing that is really important."

"Outside of that, the other thing that we had on the list that was big is offline conversions tracking, which is a whole different game. How it works... do you want to explain a little bit about how that works and why that matters?"

"Yeah, so it kind of goes back to what we discussed earlier, how each click on an ad platform is assigned a unique number string. Actually, it's numbers and letters, and this thing's like 200 characters long or something. It's ridiculous."

"Yeah, because there's a unique one per click that has ever happened on Google, so it's long."

"And this ID is how Google is able to assign or... it's how it's able to tie back to the ad level, to the ad group level, to the campaign level, what actions a click took. So when we talk about offline conversion tracking, we can have that ID pushed into your CRM from the calls or the forms where we can say, 'Okay, John is in our CRM.' As he changes his stages in the CRM, we can have those stages tied to an offline action in the ad account for lead qualified, appointment, opportunity, contract, deal. And then each time he takes those actions, because that lead is tied to that ID in

"And then each time he takes those actions, because that lead is tied to that ID in the CRM that's made in the ad platform, we then can know that that keyword, that ad, that ad group, whatever, took those actions offline. And like we mentioned, if Google doesn't know what's happening, it can't optimize towards it. And so by giving it insight into those actions that happened offline that aren't tracked by a cookie or by a script, we can give it insight into context that it wouldn't have otherwise. And it's kind of a complete game-changer to go from 'here's my cost per lead' to 'here's my cost per appointment' at the ad group, at the ad level."

"Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key thing here is you'll never get all the data out of Google. Like, you could pull campaign, keyword, out of date... out of Google. A lot of people don't realize how insignificant that information really is, especially like keyword data, for example, where you have a search term that could have matched to any one of 20 keywords. So you find you track bad lead quality to one of them, so you cut out that keyword, and really at the end of the day, you have the same search terms, they're just diluted amongst other keywords. You know, so you're kind of trying to optimize things in these buckets, but what goes in what bucket is different every day, so it's not really useful, right?"

"So search term is all we care about. You'll never get search term out of Google though, it doesn't let you do that. Not anymore. It used to, but these days Google has all this data that they'll never give you. So the only way that you can really have a close-up tracking system is you have to bring your data into Google, and then you can analyze a ton of stuff."

"I want to explain exactly how this works, because you explained it a little bit, but I just want to make sure it's super clear. So the click happens, that has this unique stream. You need to program your form so that it has what's called a hidden field in it. In that hidden field, it takes information from the URL and it pulls it into the form, right? So you would have a hidden field called like 'Google click ID' basically, and it would take that string. And you can do this with most form softwares, and then you're capturing the Google click ID with each thing. And then later, kind of like you described, there's that upload where you say, 'Here's a click ID, here's what happens.' Super valuable. I think there is no strategy that's more powerful at optimizing the quality in the long term. That's my personal opinion."

"And I think this goes... I mean, this extends beyond just digital marketing, right? It's kind of true for anything in your business. What you measure improves, and what you don't measure gets ignored. And it's... you can't expect Google to be any different, right? So ultimately, if you care about something, you should be tracking that and you should be giving that data to Google. And through that, you can get a lot more... a lot more optimized."

"Is there anything else you'd say with conversion tracking to... is something that you could do just do it on a very high level?"

"The other thing that I would probably speak to is, and this might be too deep of a cut, but giving those actions an assigned value. Because you know, as we know, not all leads are of equal worth to your business. But for Google, unless it's otherwise... it's going to assume that if it drives a form, it killed it and that was exactly what we wanted, and we want more and more of that. But if we can assign those different offline actions a value that is a rough approximation of how much more or less valuable one action is versus the other... it doesn't have to be like, 'These are the dollars that go into my bank account when this action happens,' but more it's more of like a relative value than an absolute value. That's going to help over time to teach Google which actions we want more of, because it can't base it off of like the name of the action, right? It has to have numbers attached to it."

"Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that whole world of value tracking and bidding and all that stuff is something that I think we'll talk a little bit more about in the next episode. So to give people a little bit of an understanding of at least for right now what we have coming up here, we're going to talk about bid strategies, including some that are value-based bids, some different settings, and click fraud if you ever heard of that, and locations. And those are kind of like the last four items that we have as part of the core PPC."

"So anyway, definitely tune in next time, because we're going to talk about how bid strategies, and then following that, also how bids kind of build on conversion tracking, because all conversion tracking is kind of the foundation for all of those things. So that'll be super interesting. But as for today, hopefully nobody's brain is completely fried. That's it for the episode. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time."

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