Google Ads Conversion Tracking: Why Clean Data Is Everything

Why Conversion Tracking Should Come Before You Spend a Dollar

It can be argued that, aside from a well-functioning website, the next most important thing to have before launching a Google Ads campaign is well-functioning conversion tracking. After all, there's no good reason for a small business to spend any money at all on Google Ads unless that money can be quantifiable.

Within the last several years, Google has, more and more, heavily relied on automation and AI to inform its bidding decisions and review process. Less of this is becoming manual and more of it is moving the way of automation.

Conversion Tracking Is the Food That Runs the Machine

Conversion tracking is the food that runs the Google Ads automation machine. Now, you can set nearly anything as your main conversion action, a pageview, a channel subscription, phone call or sales. However, in order to achieve the most success from Google Ads, we recommend that you only truly set your most valuable actions to primary within your conversion action set. This means that those goals will be the only ones that Google Ads will optimize for Smart Bidding purposes.

Setting too many goals as primary or setting duplicate actions to primary will result in overcounting conversions and will thus tell Google that you are receiving more conversions than you actually are. This may result in worse performance over time as Smart Bidding starts optimizing towards actions that you may not consider valuable.

The Duplicate Conversion Problem Most Accounts Get Wrong

We've audited a lot of accounts that will have more than one purchase conversion (see above). This is fine if only one is set to primary. However, if both are set to primary and both are counting conversions and conversion value, Google will inform its Smart Bidding algorithms that you are actually getting twice the value and twice the conversions in your account than you actually are.

Understanding Account Default Conversions in Google Ads

Beyond setting your primary actions, another critical area for clean data is understanding Google's handling of 'account default' conversions. Google has labeled these at the conversion type level (the header sections such as: purchase, add to cart, begin checkout, phone call lead, contact, get directions, download, pageview, etc). You can choose whether or not these subcategories of conversions are labeled "account default" by selecting the "edit goal" section on the upper right of each category. Google will label your conversions as misconfigured if you have a subcategory labeled as account default with no primary conversion action.

Conversion Windows and Repeat Rates: The Details That Matter

In addition to making sure you have clean conversion tracking, check to ensure that your conversion windows align across your conversion actions and that you do not have a high repeat rate per conversion action. These things can spell out potential issues in providing Google clean data for it to base its bidding optimizations on.

Smart Bidding Is Only as Smart as Your Data

Google's Smart Bidding is only as smart as the data you give it. Having solid, accurate conversion data for the events that matter most on your website enables you to prove your ROI, optimize effectively and train Google's Smart Bidding algorithm to bid appropriately on your behalf.

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