B2B Google Ads Conversion Tracking Setup: What Actually Matters

Louis: Welcome back to the podcast. Today we’re gonna be talking through a topic request that we’ve had through one’s come from Diane, and it’s a question that reads, “what should I care about in the world of Google Ads? Literally, it’s a minefield.” so Maelie, I think maybe we could whittle it down to one thing that we’d focus on each. What do you reckon?

Maelie: Uh, yeah, I think so. We were talking about this before, weren’t we? And. It is a challenge doing it just down to one thing. ’cause I’m a firm believer that it’s often a mix of different things. But if you kind of were forcing me to pick just one thing. I think for me it would be making sure that you’re targeting the right people. So I’d, I’d start with search personally, and the reason being is if there’s search there for your thing for. Search is brilliant because that is where the high intent is coming through. You can go really specific with search and grab intent so you know that the people you’re reaching are right when it comes to Google Ads, if you let it have free reign, it’s going to actually go a little bit all over the place from where you asked it to go. So I would really highly recommend that when you pick your high intent keywords. You want to make sure that you go exact match on these as well. Now gone are the days when exact match meant that you’d actually hit that exact keyword, and you’ll still get some rogue things in there. So still part of that targeting is that you should also be keeping a really close eye on the search terms that are coming through and remove anything that clearly hasn’t got the right intent, doesn’t look right, and deviates massively from the original keyword that you put in as well.

Louis: lot of marketers talk about, um, kind of saturating a segment as well. so that you reach like a higher percentage of that audience. And I guess like speaking to that as well, like exact match targeting, lets you do that because you are also gonna spend a lot less budget with that keyword type than you would with like phrase or broad.

Maelie: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think you can learn more and really hone in that approach rather than trying to do everything all at once. And we all know what happens when you do everything all at once. Nothing tends to work that well at all.

Louis: you know, the same as like making no changes is bad. Making too many changes is, is also bad. You’re not gonna really take stock of what works when you changed it. So if you’re laser focusing in on just exact match keywords, it massively condenses the scope of what you’re doing. Rather than if you had multiple match types, multiple channels, like you know, all of that, it’s gonna be a lot easier to not only manage, but also to kind of, uh, see what’s making the difference as you make the changes as well.

Maelie: in the same scope, you still find that you’ve got a lot to do, it’s just that those things are now focused in on that keyword or set of keywords. And so it becomes a lot more likely to work for that approach because now you’re going to be making better ad copies along those keywords, You’re gonna be spotting trends quicker because there’s gonna be budget going towards it, You are going to see how people interacting with that landing page, and maybe there’s some holes. So you’ll still have a lot to do. It’s just, it’s gonna be so much more focused.

Louis: Yeah, and I think for me, like if I was to choose one thing. and it’s not, it’s not really an ongoing focus, but it’s having really clean and accurate conversion tracking in place and having that in place as far downstream as you can. So making sure that your actual conversions in Google ads things like form fills, demo requests, inquiry, and you’re not kind of muddying the data with less valuable conversions like email clicks or telephone clicks and things like that. then also taking the time to integrate your Google Ads tracking with your CRM.

Maelie: Mm-hmm.

Louis: kind of pair back the quality of those leads to the specific keywords, to the specific ad groups, campaigns, so on and so forth. over time, the data that you build is gonna become more and more useful and insightful. And if you’re gathering data over a long time, horizon, three months, six months, 12 months, is, you can go back and you can look at the conversion data. You can ask what’s actually working. And that’s the point where it gets a lot more useful to bring on a, a specialist because they can look at that data and they can spend a lot less time actually pointing you in a stronger direction. that’s probably the main thing for me. You know, I’m, I’m a bit of a data head. I love looking through what’s working then creating a data-backed plan. But I think that conversion tracking is the one thing that you can’t do retrospectively. So I almost say it’s like, you know, having like a, door of a nightclub or an event, you know, when they’re there, they can see who’s going in and who’s going out, and they can kind of click it through, count it off. But if you put someone there halfway through the night, well, there’s no way of them knowing how many people have gone in or out before that. And conversion tracking is exactly the same thing. So it’s really important to get it in place like as early as possible.

Maelie: I actually think in a way, conversion tracking, is part of your targeting as well. Because without conversion tracking, you can’t see what’s working, what’s not working, and so you’re not really optimising towards anything. So the two are really a non-negotiable duo that make every ad account better.

Louis: conversion tracking is hard. it’s technically complex. and so like that sometimes stops people from taking action because you know that it’s gonna take a bit of time and frustration to get it right because obviously there’s one thing, like having conversion data in place. Obviously that’s great, but making sure that it’s complete and accurate. that’s also really important. But the way that I’d position it to, to try and kind of put across how urgent it is, is that for every day that you haven’t got accurate conversion tracking in place, you are losing money your ad account is gonna be a lot less efficient and effective than it would be if you had it in place. it means that you can see the data, but it also means that Google can see the data as well. So it’s able to look at each time it’s gonna bid on someone searching it’s gonna up value or devalue the bid on that person based on how likely they are to convert. So if you don’t have that conversion data in place, you are actually potentially gonna be paying over the odds for every click that’s, that’s kind of, that’s my plea, that’s my plea to make it urgent, is that for every, like I said, for every day, you haven’t got conversion tracking in pace. It’s costing you money because your ad campaigns are gonna be much less effective.

Maelie: And for those marketers listening, Lou, what would you say are the essentials of conversion tracking? What things should they have in place?

Louis: that’s a nice curve ball there, Maelie. Um, I think there’s a few things. I think one of the things that gets overlooked a lot is that, and you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go a little bit technical, so you know, apologies. Feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn if you want me to unpack this a little bit. you know, it used to be the case that you’d always advocate for having a thank you page after the form fill, um, because that makes it really nice and clean to track a conversion. You know, anyone that hit this page means that they filled in a form and obviously you make sure it’s hidden from search engines and things like that. But now, you know, with things like consent mode going in place, it means that a lot of conversion data is actually hidden. Because if people don’t consent, then that data doesn’t get passed back to Google to to be processed. So one of the things that I would say if it’s possible, is to use, you know, what’s called an event based trigger in Google Tag Manager, means that rather than waiting until someone hits a thank you page to fire a conversion, firing that conversion, the moment someone fills in that form because when someone hits the thank you page, there’s no data there for Google to use as part of its enhanced conversions, which is how it enriches uh, conversion data. So like basically the data that you get lost from, uh, you know, consent mode being in place, enhanced conversions tries to gather back some of that data taking things like name, email address, and phone number, you know, encrypting it hash. Then looking against records like, you know, do we have Chrome users that you, that, that match these details and things like that to try and piece together more conversions for you. So when you use an event-based trigger, someone submits a form and as that form is being processed, those details are available and Google can try and recognise them and match them against users so you get a little bump in the data as well. That’s probably, you know, golden rule number one. Golden rule number two, um, is something that’s been coming up, uh, quite a lot recently, which is how do you categorise the different types of conversion actions? like, you know, the question that I’m getting asked a lot at the moment is, should I have one conversion action for literally every single form? Uh, and the answer for that would be no. But on the flip side, you don’t just want one conversion that’s any form fill on the website as well, because you’ve really gotta lean in and think about the value of those form fills. So for example, If someone signs up to your mailing list, not as valuable a form fill as if someone was to book a demo, uh, demo request because, a mailing list signup doesn’t have any implied purchase intent, whereas booking a demo does. So, you know, I’d have one, I’d have one conversion for mailing list signup, might set it to secondary rather than primary. have one conversion action for demo bookings. Uh, by product if relevant. I’d have one like conversion set up for the get in touch form. You know, you can kind of see where I’m going. I wouldn’t set up a conversion action for every individual form. really think about the nature and the intent behind those forms and try and go for one conversion action by like type and intent value.

Maelie: Would you agree on the benefit there as well being, if someone is doing it the way that you are suggesting and putting the effort into thinking upfront on categorising these in a way that suits them, they’re gonna thank themselves, you know, a couple of months down the line when they realise they’ve gotta spin up a load more landing pages and they haven’t put them in themselves into this position where they have to conversion track absolutely everything.

Louis: 100%. when I’m thinking about setting up like a tracking project, what I’m trying to ask myself is like, question will the client that I’m doing this for be asking themselves six, 12 months down the line? ’cause the, the risk is always like, okay, how many questions can I answer here? You can, you can spend so much time trying to set up for every different instance of every different question, but actually what you wanna be thinking about is like, where’s the value here? And you’re really gunning to, to pinpoint on each point of value. I, how do I want the data to be structured? Like what do I want the individual line items to be so I can compare and contrast and see what’s leading to sales, what’s leading to the most valuable actions and, and things like that.

Maelie: Yeah. Awesome. That makes total sense. Okay, cool. So what I really want to do here as well is Diane sent a great question through, and I almost wanna give a wrap up of here’s where to take it from here. We suggested two major steps. I’ll run through my one, but that is if you’re just starting out, really dive into where your intent searches are, the things that are gonna turn into business, and make sure that you’re targeting those and you’re targeting them on exact match and any extra search terms that are coming through that don’t match, that keyword you picked initially is removed from there.

Louis: I’ll add a little, uh, you know, side note to what you were saying as well, is like, I, I would just exclude the howlers, do you know what I mean? Like, if something is like, kind of is, is not exactly the same as the keyword that you’re targeting but is still kind of relevant and high intent, I’d definitely keep that in place. that’s definitely a good, good shout. Yeah, we, we see it day in, day out, so when I say that, I do mean the howler and the things that clearly have no

Maelie: relevance. So, yeah, like, you know, to wrap up my side simply, it’s just that tracking should be in place urgently. And it should be clean. And it should be accurate. And, you know, tying in what, with what Miley said about the high intent keywords, you want to only be using the high intent conversions as well.

Louis: Awesome. And if those two things were done. Would they get a much better sense of navigating the minefield of Google Ads, do you think? I reckon so, I mean, it always helps to have a direction to point in, doesn’t it? So, you know, I’d probably say focus on those things first. You know, conversion actions is like a one and done thing, which is always good. Then once that’s in place, focus on the targeting. It makes a lot of sense. So, uh,

Maelie: Yep.

Louis: thanks for joining us today. If you enjoyed it, feel free to request your own, uh, topic that we can run through for you. Just head to webmarketeruk.com/topic and yeah, we’ll look forward to reading what you sent through. So hope you have a fab couple of weeks before the next one. Thanks. Goodbye.