The Ultimate 2025 Guide to Google Ads Conversion Tracking: (Setup, Tips, Best Practices)

Last Updated on 13 January 2025 by Stu Edwards

Say you’re running a Google Ads campaign. The clicks are coming in, but are they translating into meaningful actions?

Are people signing up, completing purchases, or taking the next step—or are those clicks just not converting?

That’s where Google Ads conversion tracking comes in.

It helps you connect the dots between clicks and outcomes, so you can understand what’s working and refine what’s not.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up, testing, and optimising conversion tracking, so you can make data-driven decisions and maximise the impact of your campaigns.

What makes conversion tracking so valuable?

Imagine pouring money into ads without knowing which ones are actually driving sales.

That’s what happens when you skip conversion tracking—a lot of guessing, frustration, and potentially tens of thousands of wasted dollars.

“Google’s conversion tracking can break down your numbers and tell you where each conversion came from. It can even show you the journey your visitors took to find you. Most importantly, it shows you where the waste is.”

Perry Marshall – Author of 80/20 Sales & Marketing & Ultimate Guide to Google Ads

We shouldn’t have to explain this, but here’s why you need robust Google Ads conversion tracking!

Know what campaigns are working (and what’s not)

Not all clicks are created equal. Conversion tracking lets you pinpoint exactly which campaigns, keywords, and bidding strategies result in actual sales, sign-ups, or other valuable actions.

For example, you might discover that one $2 keyword generates 80% of your sales while another $15 keyword only attracts window shoppers.

With this insight, you can confidently reallocate your budget to what’s truly working.

Optimise smarter with advanced tools

Ever felt overwhelmed tweaking campaigns manually? With conversion data in place, tools like Google’s Smart Bidding take over the heavy lifting.

If your goal is a $50 cost-per-acquisition (CPA), automated bidding can automatically adjust bids in real time to hit that target. Whether you’re scaling campaigns or launching new ones, these tools give you precision without the grind.

Understand the customer journey

Say someone clicks an ad on their phone during lunch but makes the purchase later that night on their laptop.

Without conversion tracking, this cross-device journey would look like a failed campaign. Conversion tracking connects these dots, revealing how different devices, touch points, and timing work together to drive conversions.

Stop wasting money on dead-end campaigns

Without conversion tracking, it’s easy to assume clicks equal success—but not all clicks turn into paying customers.

You could be spending thousands on campaigns that attract browsers, not buyers.

Conversion tracking lets you identify underperforming ads, keywords, or placements that are eating your budget without delivering results.

Instead of wasting money on guesswork, you can redirect it to campaigns that actually drive sales. For example, you might find that one expensive keyword generates tons of clicks but zero revenue, making it an obvious candidate to pause or refine.

Compete with bigger businesses no matter your budget

Imagine a small ecommerce brand competing with a national retail giant.

With conversion tracking, that small brand can discover niche opportunities — like a low-cost, high-converting keyword the bigger company overlooks or ignores.

This actionable data lets smaller businesses stretch every dollar and punch well above their weight class.

Why dedicated Google Ads conversion tracking is essential

Setting up dedicated Google Ads conversion tracking, and not relying on analytics imports from GA4 has huge addional benefits for accounts.

Get more accurate conversion data

(10-20% uplift). After working with many businesses (lead gen, ecom) for years, we regularly see 10-20% uplift in conversion data accuracy when we layer in dedicated Google Ads conversion tracking instead of relying solely on imported analytics data.

• This “uplift” occurs because Google Ads tracking can directly track conversions associated with ad clicks and views.
• GA4 imported data might underreport conversions because of data mismatches, attribution differences, or the way GA4 processes user actions.
• Google Ads has tighter integration with its own platform, ensuring more accurate reporting.

Gain access to exclusive metrics that provide richer insights

With Google Ads tracking, you gain access to metrics unavailable in GA4, such as:

• View-through conversions: These track when someone sees your ad (but doesn’t click it) and later completes a conversion.
• Engaged-through conversions: These measure conversions following interactions with display or video ads, not just clicks.

These metrics give you a fuller picture of how your ads influence customer actions—even for users who don’t click immediately. More on those later!

This helps measure the total impact of your ad campaigns, not just direct click-to-conversion paths.

What types of conversions can you track in Google Ads?

Google Ads gives you the tools to track how customers interact with your business.

From purchases to calls, here’s a breakdown of the key conversion types you can measure:

1. Website

Website tracking captures activities like purchases, form submissions, or button clicks.

For instance, when a customer completes checkout and lands on a “Thank You” page, or downloads an eBook after submitting their email, these actions count as conversions.

This data lets you pinpoint which product pages, landing pages, or calls-to-action drive results.

A common example: tracking how a discount code applied at checkout boosts sales during promotional campaigns.

2. Phone calls

For mobile app advertisers, tracking doesn’t stop at downloads—it extends into user behaviour.

Google Ads can measure conversions like completing a first purchase, subscribing to premium features, or hitting milestones in your app (e.g., reaching level 10 in a game).

For Android, this process is seamless through Google Play, while iOS may require SDK integration or third-party tools.

These insights help refine campaigns targeting high-LTV users.

3. App installs and in-app purchases

For businesses advertising mobile apps, track app downloads and user activity within the app itself.

Google Ads can automatically capture these conversions for Android apps or use custom setups for iOS apps.

Whether it’s tracking installs or in-app purchases, you’ll gain insights into how users engage with your app.

4. Offline conversions

Many customer journeys start online but end offline, like a customer who clicks your ad, fills out a lead form, and later closes the deal via a phone call or in-store visit.

By importing offline conversions into Google Ads, businesses like car dealerships or real estate agencies can attribute revenue back to specific ad clicks.

For example, you could discover that leads from one campaign consistently result in high-ticket sales, while others fall short.

How to set up Google Ads conversion tracking

In 99% of cases, we’ll create the conversion action in Google Ads, then create a Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag in Tag Manager, along with a specific trigger that fires the tag and ultimately the conversion action.

For this article in our own Google Ads account, we’ve created a test conversion action called ‘PDF Download: Thank you page‘.

We’ve detailed how we do it step by step below:

1. Choose the type of conversion to track

Before diving into the setup, decide what customer action you want to track.

Google Ads allows you to track:

• Website actions: Purchases, form submissions, or button clicks.
• Phone calls: Calls made via a call extension or the number displayed on your website.
• App installs or in-app actions: Downloads or interactions within your mobile app.
• Offline Conversions: In-store visits, calls, or purchases traced back to your ad campaigns.

💡 Tip: Start with the conversion type that aligns closest with your business goals.

2. Create a conversion action in Google Ads

1. In your account menu, navigate to Goals in the top-right corner
2. Under Conversions, click Summary
3. Click the blue ‘Create conversion action’.

Choosing the conversions do you want to measure

As of December 2024, we’ve started seeing a new re-skinned ‘simpler conversion measurement setup’ across accounts we manage.

Here you select the type of conversion you want to create.

You’ve got a few different options on how to get this action set up, but for our PDF download example we’re going to go down the Conversions on a website route.

When you click into this, you’ll be asked for the URL where your conversion will be tracked, then Google will scan and check the best way to connect it to to measure your web conversions.

We’ve added our URL, and can see that the Google Tag is already installed.

Click continue, then you’ll be presented with a What do you want to measure? section.

As we’re tracking a PDF download, we’ll select Submit lead form as our conversion action, but you could select Sign up or Subscribe, it’s up to you!

Then you’ll need to add an event to this action. Click Set up under the Google tag Conversion source.

Now you’ll see the option to either:

• Create a codeless event: “event that can be detected by your Google tag without adding any code to your website”
• Create a manual event: “Install code on your website to identify the event that you want to measure”

Let’s say we want our conversion action to trigger when users visit a ‘thank you’ page URL after submitting a form.

For a Codeless event example, we need to define settings for:

• ‘Event type’ – Page load
• ‘Match when’ – URL contains
• ‘URL’ – /thank-you-download

For a Manual event example, you select it and give you conversion a name, say ‘PDF Download: Thank you page’, then save and continue.

You’ll then see a section called ‘Finish setting up your conversions‘.

Here you’ll have 3 options to choose from:

• Set up with a Google Tag
• Email instructions to your webmaster
• Use Google Tag Manager

For the Set up with a Google Tag option, select the ‘Page load’ option, as we want the conversion to fire only when users lands on the thank you URL.

You’ll see the code snippet that you’ll need to add to that specific page on your website.

The Email instructions to your webmaster (the lazy route!) is simple, just add in their email, choose whether your event is Page load or Click and send that to them.

For the Use Google Tag Manager route (the best is our opinion) you’ll be given 2 essential things.

• Conversion ID
• Conversion label

Make a note of these, as you’ll need to add them to your Google Ads conversion tag in Tag Manager later.

Hit finish, then you’ve created your conversion action!

The finish line’s in sight, but first you’ll need to review your conversion settings to make sure they suit your needs, and to ensure your getting the right data into your account.

Google Ads Conversion Settings

So, we created our conversion, now it’s time to review the settings.

In the menu, head to the Summary section under Goals, then find your conversion action, ‘PDF Download: Thank you page’ in our case.

Here you’ll see all the stock settings for your conversion.

Click ‘Edit settings’ for a deeper view of the available settings, where you can click into each section.

Conversion name

This one is self explanatory, but here’s where you can change your conversion name.

Action optimisation

Here you define whether your conversion goal is a primary or secondary action.

• Primary actions are used for used for bidding optimisation and are reported on as ‘Conversion’ in the account
• Secondary actions aren’t used for bidding optimisation and is reported in in the ‘All conversions’ column in the account

We see Primary actions as a macro conversion – something we want to report on, and what automated bidding strategoes optimise for.

An example Primary action might be a lead to your business, or a purchase.

We see Secondary actions as a micro conversions – something we want to see data on, but isn’t included as core conversion action.

An example secondary action might be an email click on your website, or when user adds a product to their cart.

So why’s this important? Why have both?

Secondary actions help guide our decisions and provide more context to the conversion journey.

In our ‘add to cart’ example, we might see a large number of people taking this action, and not progressing to a purchase.

Depending on the product price, volume of sales, purchase length etc, we might chose to flip this conversion action to a primary action, so Google optimises bids for this action.

Ultimately there’s no right or wrong here – and it depends on your business and offering.

Value

Here you can define the ‘value’ of the conversion. We typically assign values to conversions from the start to make the data more actinable over time.

You’ve got 3 value options:

• Use the same value for each conversion
• Use different values for each conversion
• Don’t use a value for this conversion action

If your conversion actions are leads or enquiries – form submissions, phone calls, you could use either ‘Use the same value‘ or ‘Don’t use a value‘.

The benefit of adding a value is when you want to see a revenue value assiscated with the conversion. You might deem that booking a demo for your SaaS product is worth $500, and that downloading a PDF is worth $50, and you want to see that value in your performance metrics…

There’s no real downside to the ‘Don’t use a value’, despite what Google says here.

💡 Tip: Having a value associated with these types of leads if also essential for value based bidding strategies, like target ROAS.

If you’re tracking website purchases and sales, then it’s essential that you set up the ‘Use different values for each conversion‘ option.

This way the correct purchase value for each transaction is captured and reported on, rather than a generic value.

How this dynamic purchase value is passed back to Google Ads depends on your CMS and your analytics set up.

💡 Tip: Don’t skip this step if you’re running Google Ads for ecommerce.

Count

Here we define how a conversion is counted.

We’ve got 2 options:

• Every
• One

‘Every‘ is essential for purchases, when you want to count each time a conversion happens.

‘One‘ is typically for leads, enquires sign-ups etc when only the first interaction is valuable.

If you take our PDF download conversion example, we would define a count of ‘One’ for this, because we don’t need to know if a user downloaded this more than once.

What matters is that they downloaded it, and we can attribute the conversion to a specific campaigns/adgroup/keyword.

Click-through conversion window

The Click-through conversion window refers to the time period after a user clicks on your ad, to when a conversion can be attributed to that click.

It defines how long Google will track a user’s activity to determine if their actions qualify as a conversion linked to the initial ad click…

This is an important setting to pay attention to, as depending on your product or offering, conversions can happen days/weeks/months after someone interacts with your ad.

For instance, a conversion action for someone like an local plumber might immediate – as in the user clicks the ad then calls.

But a conversion length for a more complex offering with a longer sales cycle, like a healthcare platform for enterprise businesses might take months, or way beyond the 30 day default for this setting.

💡 Tip: If in doubt, set the duration length to the maximum.

Engaged-view conversion window

Related specifically to video engagement from YouTube ads, the Engaged-view conversion window is the period of time after a person watches 10 seconds or more of your video ad.

The default here is 3 days, with a maximum of 30 days.

View-through conversion window

The View-through conversion window refers to the period after a user views your ad (but doesn’t click on) – during which a conversion can be attributed to that ad view.

This is an essential metric for Display / Performance Max / YouTube campaigns types, where users might see your ad as an impression, not interact with it directly, and then convert later.

Attribution

The attribution model you select determines how much credit each ad interaction gets for your conversion action.

The conversion source (Google Ads, an imported GA4 conversion) determines which channels are eligible to receive credit for a conversion.

There are 2 options, depending on the conversion source:

1. Paid and organic channels
2. Google paid channels

1. Paid and organic channels
Paid and organic channels are all eligible to receive conversion credit, but only credit assigned to Google Ads channels will appear in this account.

2. Google paid channels
Only Google Ads paid channels are eligible to receive conversion credit.

(Notice the difference in credit assigned to the touch points in the image above, compared to the ‘Paid and organic channels’ option.)

In terms of which attribution model to choose, you have 2 options:

• Data-driven
• Last-click

We suggest sticking with Data-driven for 99% of cases.

Enhanced conversions

Enhanced conversions allow Google Ads to attribute conversions more accurately in a privacy-first environment where third-party cookies may be blocked or limited.

Getting more reliable and accurate conversion data into Google Ads accounts, leveraging user provided first-party data (email addresses, name, phone numbers etc) is key to better conversion attribution.

Setting up Enhanced conversions is now an essential step in Google Ads conversion tracking and shouldn’t be ignored.

We’ve created a dedicated guide on Enhanced Conversions – how they work, how to set them up – which you should definitely check out!

How to test Google Ads conversion tracking

Once you’ve gone through all the effort of setting up a conversion action, you need to test that it’s working correctly!

After you’ve created your conversion, it’ll likely show as Inactive / Unverified, which is normal.

You can speed this up by testing it yourself. This is where Tag Manager shines yet again!

Google Tag Manager preview mode

1. Log into Tag Manager
2. ‘Preview’ the website where your conversion action is
3. Perform a test conversion for yourself, and debug the conversion tracking setup if it’s not firing

If the conversion fires successfully in the preview mode, it’ll be just a matter of time before the data passes back to Google Ads and the action is verified.

You could also set up a dedicated test campaign and a separate environment for testing, and keep your active campaigns untouched.

Then search for your ad, click, convert, and wait to see if the conversion shows in the campaign…

This option isn’t ideal for obvious reasons.

Go down the Tag Manager route and never look back!

4 common mistakes I see people make when setting up Google Ads conversion tracking

Mistake #1 Choosing the wrong counting method

If your Google Ads reporting is off, your whole strategy could be hinging on a shaky foundation.

And yet, it’s surprisingly easy to overlook one critical decision—how you count conversions.

✅ ‘Every’ is ideal for transactions, but not for lead generation (e.g., form submissions), as it counts every instance.
✅ ‘One’ is better for leads to avoid multiple counts for the same user action.

Mistake #2 Tracking irrelevant or low-value actions

Think along of the lines of tracking /about or /contact page views as primary conversions, instead of what really matters – purchases, leads, or other meaningful goals.

We see this surprisingly often during our Google Ads audits.

Tracking irrelevant actions dilutes your focus, skews performance metrics, and wastes time optimising for data that doesn’t translate into revenue.

What to do instead:

✅ Identify conversion actions that align with your business objectives
✅ Ditch the vanity metrics and focus on tracking behaviours and actions that directly impact your bottom line.

Your conversion tracking should measure impact, not just activity.

Mistake #3 Double counting imported GA4 conversions as ‘Primary’

Marketers often mistakenly assign duplicate GA4 imported conversions as ‘Primary,’ resulting in double-counted data.

This inflates conversion metrics and skews performance insights, making it harder to gauge the true effectiveness of your campaigns.

When importing GA4 conversions into Google Ads, carefully review and categorise them.

Only mark unique and critical actions as ‘Primary’ to maintain clean, reliable data.

Mistake #4 Setting the window too short or too long

The default Click-Through Conversion window in Google Ads is 30 days.

While this might work for many campaigns, not tailoring it to your specific sales cycle can lead to misleading data.

❌ Too Short (e.g. 7 days): This may underreport conversions for products or services with longer decision-making processes.

For example, high-value purchases like enterprise software or real estate often require weeks of research, consultations, or team approvals before a customer commits.

❌ Too Long (e.g., 90 days): On the other hand, an overly extended window can over attribute conversions to older campaigns that didn’t directly drive the final action.

For instance, a click from three months ago might no longer have any relevance to a recent sale influenced by newer ads.

Final thoughts

Google Ads conversion tracking can feel overwhelming at first, with all the setups, integrations, and metrics to monitor.

But simplifying the process starts with answering three key questions:

1. What specific actions do we want to track that truly matter to our business?
2. What tools or platforms can we leverage to make tracking seamless and accurate?
3. How will we use the data we collect to improve our ad performance and drive better results?

If you need help with setting up your conversion tracking, schedule a call now and a growth expert from our team will get back to you ASAP!