We all know about Google ads. This platform has helped Google grow into one of the biggest and most lucrative businesses in the world, and all of it is based on ads!
If you want to have good ads you have to know what your ads are doing, how they are performing, and who they are reaching. To know this, you need to set up your ads so that they track valuable information and show it to you so you can make decisions based on real data, and not just hunches.
Setting up tracking, while not that difficult, can be daunting for newcomers in the affiliate industry, so today, we are going to try to explain the basics and help you get going!
What is Google Ads Tracking?
Tracking with Google ads is the process of measuring the performance and results of your ad campaigns by tracking what users do after they interact with your ads. This could be things like purchases on your website, sign-ups, form submissions, leaving the page at a certain step, clicking on certain links, or anything else you define!
The thing with tracking is that you can go as broad or detailed as you want. And the more you understand the data you capture, the more you can do with it and optimize your campaigns in the future!
Why Is It Important?
Running ads without tracking set up is a bad idea in most cases. This means that you have no idea how your ads are performing, why they are performing that way, and how to fix or scale these results.
With proper tracking, you can:
- Measure your return on investment (ROI) and identify which ads to scale, and which ones to cut to maximize wins and minimize losses.
- Optimize your campaign performance by finding data on keywords that work, ads that perform well, landing pages that drive conversions, and more. The more data you collect the more you can know how everything you do works, and how to improve your results further.
- Control budgets by scaling campaigns that are making money and cutting losses early with missed ad campaigns. With the proper technique, you can even learn why a certain campaign is under or overperforming and what you can do to improve its results.
- Improve your audience targeting by finding users who are likely to be interested in what you have to offer and convert.
- Understand your audience better. Every person has slightly different tastes and behavior. If you learn what your audience looks like on average, you will know what they tend to respond to the best, what they dislike, and how to approach them properly.
How To Set Up Tracking in Google Ads
So, enough empty words, let's show you how to Set up your tracking!
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Understanding The basics
Before starting it's best to read and watch a few tutorials that explain the basics so you don’t waste your time finding out how things work while working on them. Learn what you should be tracking, decide what is important for you, and do the work to learn as much as you can about it.
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Setting Up Conversion Tracking
To create a conversion action you should navigate to your tools and settings menu, and find “conversions” in the menu. There you should find a nice “+” button you can use to create a new conversion action. Enter your website for tracking and choose your website. You can pick from actions like purchases, lead gen forms, or phones,
Once you have that you should be able to open your page and define things through a handy prompt. You can define conversions such as a purchase form submission, and many other things.
Depending on what you picked, you should name your conversion, and define a value to it if it's available.
The next step would be to install Google Tag on your website. This is usually a piece of code you paste in your site's <head> section. With this, you can get more granular data and track everything with greater efficiency.
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Use Templates and ValueTrack Parameters
Here you can find predefined parameters for tracking various things. The first ones are called tracking templates, and they are a great starting point if you don’t know how to adapt the thing to your use case.
Value track parameters are also predefined and often offer more insight into your performance, as well as keywords that were triggered and more.
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UTM Parameters
UTM or Urchin Tracking Module parameters are tags that are added to your URL that help track specific campaigns in special ways across different traffic sources. The key parameters you should know about are:
- utm_source: Identifies the referrer (e.g., google, newsletter).
- utm_medium: Identifies the medium (e.g., cpc, email).
- utm_campaign: Identifies the specific campaign (e.g., summer_sale).
- utm_term: Identifies search terms (useful for paid search campaigns).
- utm_content: Tracks similar content or links within the same ad.
An example of all of this could be: https://www.example.com/page?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=spring_sale
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Test and Verify
Of course, after you have set everything up, you should give everything a test to make sure you have actually done things properly.
- Conversion action: Google ads have a built-in Test button that can help you verify that the URLs are properly configured.
- Google Tag Assistant: If you use Tags, then you can stay silent and protect yourself that way.
- Check for Delays: if data takes more than a few hours to populate, contact support as something might be off.
Common Problems That Users Face
There are mistakes that even experienced marketers make, but no worries all of them are fixable! But it's better to avoid issues altogether than fix them later on, so here are some common issues you might face!
- Not Setting Up Conversion Tracking
Always set up conversion actions. These will help you track your goals better and help you understand how close you are to your goal, and what you need to do to reach it!
- Bad Google Tag Placement
When placing the tag on your page, make sure you put it in the right section of the website code. Depending on whether you built your page with online builders or coded it from scratch, you might have to paste the right code into the site HTML itself, or just add it to a field somewhere.
- Tracking The Wrong Actions
Some metrics are more important than others, and what’s important depends on your campaign and its goals. For example, sometimes tracking things like page views can leave you with no real data, as you should be checking for conversion instead.
- Not Testing Your Setup
Testing is always an important step. If you already went through the trouble of setting everything up, make sure to test your work so that you know it tracks all parameters as you expect, and properly!
- Ignoring UTM Parameters
UTM tags are specific parameters inside of a link that can allow for better tracking of information. Ignoring setting these up means that you will likely get less data, and track less stuff for no reason!
- Neglecting Cross-Device Tracking
People switch their devices all the time. At home, they might be using a tablet, during work hours a computer, and their phone is on day and night. In case someone starts converting on one device and ends up on another, make sure to have cross-device tracking enabled, so that it can catch these cases and track them properly!
- Delays in Data
Sometimes data can take a few hours to process and update properly. This is why sometimes marketers tend to make decisions based on incomplete data. Always wait to see the full results before making a decision.
Conclusion
Setting up Tracking within Google ads might seem like a difficult task at first, but once you go through the basics, you will be set! If you set up your tracking properly, you can find valuable data that can help you refine your campaigns and make them so that they make more money than anyone expects them to.
While it's easy to make a mistake, all of them are easily fixable and you can test that everything is set up correctly before you launch anything. This means you don’t have to worry about doing it right the first time around, you just need to worry about doing it in the first place, as the data tracked is very valuable.
How have you set up your Google Ads Tracking? Share your experience with us in the comments below!
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