Conversion tracking
What is conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking is the setup that ties a click on an ad to the action you have decided counts as a result: an order, a submitted form, a phone call. It runs on a tag on the site plus rules for what counts, whether it counts once or every time, and what it is worth. Without it the ad platform learns blind and the report shows clicks instead of orders.
Example
An account reports 240 conversions on €1,800 of spend: €7.50 each. Look at the settings and every visit to the contact page is counted as a conversion. The real orders number 96, at €18.75 each. The gap is not a bookkeeping detail: automated bidding had been buying clicks from people who open the contact page and leave.
After the clean-up three actions remain: an order carrying the basket value, a submitted form, and a call placed from the ad. The order counts every time, the form once per visitor, and the page view becomes a secondary action that no longer steers the bidding.
Why it matters for a business
Tracking is the floor everything else stands on — target cost per acquisition, target return, the monthly report. Get it wrong and the error compounds: the platform optimises towards the wrong action, and the report confirms it was right to do so.
In the European Union measurement also depends on cookie consent. When the banner passes consent signals, Google models part of the conversions it may no longer observe; without those signals a hole opens that reads like a drop in performance. For service businesses, calls and later CRM stages complete the picture, so you can see which enquiry became a contract rather than only which click became an enquiry. Read the result together with the site’s conversion rate.
What to ask
- Which actions count as conversions, and which are only secondary?
- Is a value sent with each one — the real order amount?
- Has a test been run since the last change to the site?
- Do the ad platform and the analytics show the same thing, and if not, why?
- Does the cookie banner pass consent signals?
Every account we take on inside Google Ads starts with that audit.