Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 115 - Conversion actions

Smart Bidding is only as smart as the data that you give it. 

So if you're telling Google Ads to track every button click, every page load, every add to cart as a Primary conversion, then you are telling Google Ads that all you care about is window shoppers. But on the flip side, if you only make two to three sales a month and that's the only conversion data you give Google Ads, then Smart Bidding won't have enough data to work.

So how do you feed the machine just the right amount of data to drive the best possible results for your business?

Today, I'm going to show you how to develop a real conversion strategy.

When we talk about conversion tracking in Google Ads, we usually just focus on how to do it and which one to use. Let's take a step back and make sure that we're developing a foundation for your account that makes the most sense for your business goals.

Specifically, I'm going to share 7 things you might not know about conversion tracking in Google Ads, but are key to understanding if you want to power the AI and optimize with the right signals.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 115: Conversion Strategy.

1. First, let's talk about Primary versus Secondary conversion actions. 

Primary conversion actions are those things that you want Google Ads to optimize for. Secondary conversion actions are those things that you're tracking in your account, but are not the end goal you’re trying to achieve. 

Think of this as similar to how we can target or observe audiences in our campaigns, right? Targeting an audience means you only want to show ads if the user matches that audience. Whereas, observation means you want to show ads to everyone, but if they match that audience, keep track of it. 

It can be helpful to track all kinds of things as conversions in your Google Ads account, even if they're not the end goal. For example, if you run a Shopify store and you connect Shopify to Google Ads, you will automatically get conversion actions like product view, add to cart, begin checkout, as well as purchase. 

Probably you only want the purchase marked as Primary and the rest marked as Secondary, but it doesn't mean you want to delete the rest. Having them there as Secondary can give you really important information. 

For example, you'll be able to see if one in four people completes a purchase after beginning checkout, one in two people, or one in 10 people. And even though only you can use that for optimization, not Google itself since it can't see those Secondary actions, that can help you see if you need to do things, adjust your checkout flow or troubleshoot your extensions that aren't working correctly.

So although Primary is the only thing that you actually want Google Ads to optimize for, having those Secondary options can bring in a lot of useful data for your business.

2. Next, let's talk about goals versus actions.

A conversion action is the specific thing you are tracking, like a phone call, a form fill, a purchase, a calendar booking, et cetera.

When you create a conversion action in your Google Ads account, you must categorize it under a goal. For example, purchase, add to cart, qualified lead, form fill, contacts. These are the kinds of goals you can choose. And there are more than a dozen pre-selected goals for you to choose from in the Google Ads interface.

Now the distinction here can be really confusing because if you have a Primary conversion action, but it's categorized under a goal that is not included in account level goals, then it will not be used for bidding optimization or conversion tracking purposes in your campaign, even though it's marked as Primary.

So the goal categorization actually supersedes your conversion action categorization.

Why did Google design it this way? Who the heck knows? But you can bet when I was meeting with those product leads in Mountain View, California I gave them this feedback. 

This is way too confusing, but it is what it is! So let's continue.

Yes, setting actions as Primary or Secondary is important, but you'll need to double check the goal categorization and potentially move actions to different goals or change the goal settings to be included in account default, or not, if you want to affect what your campaigns are optimizing for.

3. If you're still with me, we're about to add another wrinkle into this because in your campaign settings for each campaign, you can decide whether that campaign will use account level goals or campaign specific goals.

For example, maybe you have one campaign that's optimizing for local store visits and another campaign that's optimizing for online sales. Those would be two different goals, both existing in your account, but one campaign would have campaign level goals for ecommerce and one campaign would have campaign level goals for local actions, like get directions or store visits, if you have that data.

What this means is that when you are auditing or taking over an account, or setting up a new account, there are four different layers of nuance you need to think about when building your conversion strategy:

• Whether a conversion action is Primary or Secondary

• How your conversion actions are categorized into conversion goals

• Which of those goals are included in your account level defaults or not

• Whether each campaign is using its own campaign goals or account level goals

It's finicky, it's nuanced, and honestly, it can make or break your Google Ads results if you don't have this stuff straight.

Your source of truth for all of this is going to be your conversion goals summary. I recommend scrolling down a bit and clicking where it says “view All Conversion actions.” That'll give you an easy to read table. You can add all the columns you need and see every one of the points I've just shared clearly laid out for you.

Now, once we have your conversion goals under control, we can move into actually looking at your campaign reporting to see how all these different things are doing.

4. There are two things you must add to your campaign level reporting when you're first auditing or taking over an account with existing data in it to truly understand what's going on. 

First, you want to add the column called All Conv. That means All Conversions. So now instead of just having a conversions column, you have Conversions and All Conversions. 

What's the difference? 

The conversions column will show you what that campaign is actually optimizing for while the All Conversions column will show you everything that's being tracked in the account, even if it's not being used for campaign optimization purposes. 

As we've discussed, there are a lot of reasons why something might be included in conversions or not. It could be Primary or Secondary. It could be account level default or not, it could be campaign or account level goals.

But the first step in finding out is adding that All Conversions column because then you'll clearly see what's every possible thing that's tracked in the account versus what is this specific campaign actually working towards.

5. Now, in order for that to be meaningful, you have to add a segment. 

Add the segment for conversion action. You find it by going to Segments, Conversions, Conversion Action. And now, rather than just seeing the total conversions number and the total All Conversions number, you'll see it broken out by conversion action.

For example, let's say your conversion actions in the account are calls from ads, calls from website, form fills from website, and qualified leads. Maybe your campaign is only optimizing for qualified leads, whether that's a campaign level goal, account level goal, doesn't matter, that's what that campaign is working for. 

In the conversions column, it will only show you the number of qualified leads in that period. 

But by adding the All Conversions column, and the segment by conversion action, you'll be able to see how many of those phone calls and lead forms happened as a result of this campaign, even though it's not what the campaign was optimizing for.

With that full picture, you can decide if you want to keep the conversion settings as they are or if you want to adjust them to get different results from your Smart Bidding strategy and from your campaign.

And even if you're not taking over an account right now, you're managing an account on an ongoing basis, it can still be really helpful to turn on those All Conversions and segment by conversion action once a month or once a quarter, just to check what's happening with all these other conversion actions and see if you want to adjust your conversion strategy. 

I think it's too common a mistake that we set up a Google Ads account and then never touch our conversions again. Your conversions are a key opportunity for optimization just like your bid strategy, your keywords, your audiences, your ad creative, and so many other things. Your conversions should live and breathe like everything else you optimize in your account. So be sure to keep a regular eye on this so you're not missing out on any opportunities.

By the way, this topic for this episode was influenced by a recent Google Ads coaching call I had with one of my Inside Google Ads course members. As I was walking through and explaining this all to my client, this is the kind of stuff that I think even experienced practitioners get confused about. So we got a whole episode for it.

Okay, let's keep going.

6. Now that we hopefully understand setting up these conversions and seeing the data that's happening, how do you then decide what to optimize for?

For an ecommerce business, this is usually pretty straightforward. So I'm going to show my lead gen friends some love right now.

There are a few kinds of actions you might be optimizing for. 

First is on SERP versus on your website. 

For example, calls from ads or lead form assets. These can be helpful since a user can complete those actions without ever leaving the search engine results page. But these are also more susceptible to spam or being low quality because these people have never even visited your website yet. They're becoming a lead without ever leaving the SERP. So I'm not saying don't use calls from ads or lead form assets, but I am saying use them with caution. And if you have a lead quality issue, you may need to reassess these, perhaps marking as Secondary or giving them lower value.

Next, even with on-site actions, there's a difference between a click and a completion. 

What do I mean? 

A lot of businesses will track things like clicked on the phone call button, clicked to email, clicked to book an appointment versus tracking whether these things actually happened. Just because someone clicked on the phone call button, it doesn't mean they actually called you and became a lead. Just because someone clicked on the email button, it doesn't mean they actually wrote and sent that email. Just because someone clicked to book an appointment with you, it doesn't mean they actually booked that appointment. 

So of course, it's preferable to track when people actually complete these things rather than when they start these things. But if the only option you have right now is to track when the start happens or nothing at all, then track the start - track the phone call click, track the book a meeting click - but only use that as an interim solution until you're able to track the full phone call, lead form submission, calendar booking, et cetera.

The closer the conversion action is to the thing you actually want to happen - becoming a customer, a client, et cetera - the better it's going to be for your business, for your Google Ads campaigns to optimize accordingly. If you have an issue with a lot of spam or low quality leads and you're only tracking people clicking on something on your website and not actually doing the full thing, this could be the reason why.

So how do we do that? How do we measure the actual thing versus just the click or even before that, the on-SERP action? 

Generally, you need something called lead tracking software. You have heard me talk about Offline Conversion actions. I will keep talking about Offline Conversion actions. OCT, OCI, choose your acronym.

But basically, the big gap that exists is Google does not have a built-in way for you to tell it which of those leads are quality and which are not, which of those leads become customers and which do not. It's actually kind of crazy when you think about it that Google doesn't have this built in. But that's why we have lead tracking software.

The one that I usually recommend to my clients is called WhatConverts.

Full disclosure, I am working on a brand partnership with WhatConverts right now and the reason I'm working with them on a brand partnership is that's the one that my Google Ads coaching clients have told me they enjoy using the most.

What happens with lead-tracking software like WhatConverts is that you don't have to tell Google right away when the lead happens. When someone fills out your contact form, talks to your chatbot, calls you, et cetera, that information first goes to this third-party software.

And then, if either you or someone at the business decides, "Yes, this is a qualified lead," you mark it as such, and only then does the software tell Google the conversion happened. 

This means if low-quality leads or spam start to come through, they will get nipped in the bud really fast because they won't be marked as quality leads. So Google won't even see that it was a conversion at all because it wouldn't be a conversion. You're only tracking the qualified lead. 

And then if you have enough data to do so, you could take it a step further and maybe only tell Google when that person becomes a client. So for example, let's say you get a phone call from ads, phone rings, receptionist talks to them and they say, "Oh, Jyll's business? I thought this was Jack's business. Never mind," and they hang up. Google never even knows the phone call happened.

But let's say there's another call from ads; the receptionist picks up. "Yes, we offer what you're looking for. Let's get you booked in.” Deposit Taken. Excellent. We mark that and now we tell Google, yes, this was a conversion. Go get me more like that.

For lead generation businesses, you will not be able to scale your Google Ads account successfully without Offline Conversion Tracking. 

Ecommerce businesses, you can tune back in now because you probably are tracking purchases. So lucky you, you don't need to worry about that but you do need to worry about Google Merchant Center. So I'd say it's fair in the end.

7. Last but not least, no discussion of a conversion strategy would be complete without talking about micro-conversions. 

Up until now, I've been talking about how to get deeper and deeper and deeper into your funnel to track as close as we can to the action that actually makes you money. But what if you only get a few purchases or a few clients a month? That's not going to be enough data to power Smart Bidding. So you're going to want to actually move in the other direction and track what we call micro-conversions.

A micro-conversion is a required step that someone must take on the path to conversion. So for example, clicking on the phone call button is a required step someone must take before becoming a phone call lead. Adding something to cart is a required step someone must take before purchasing online. 

But don't get this confused with other things like subscribing to your email list. That's nice. You can choose to track that as a conversion action, but it's not a micro-conversion because that's not a required step someone must take in order to convert. 

So if you get 10 conversions or fewer a month, you may want to start tracking micro-conversions so that you can feed your Google Ads algorithm much more data. Because although, let's say, an add to cart, of course, is not the same thing as a purchase, the flip side is that if someone doesn't add to cart, they will never purchase. 

So let's say that 10% of the people who visit your website add something to cart. Your purchases are 100% going to be contained in that 10%. Whereas, the 90% of website visitors who don't add to cart, 0% of your purchases are going to be in that pool of people. 

So by using that add to cart as a Primary action used for bidding optimization, we know that we're bidding towards the right kind of person who can ultimately purchase. And funnily enough, doing so can cause you to get, of course, more conversion data, but in turn lead to more actual purchases because we're feeding so much more information to Google about the right versus wrong kind of visitor we're looking for. 

And then maybe you go from 3 purchases a month to 7 purchases a month or 12 purchases a month. At that point, you can either remove or adjust your micro-conversion. Maybe we now move the goalpost: instead of add to cart, we use begin checkout, and you may need to adjust your CPA / ROAS accordingly.

And then maybe once that scales up and we have enough of the next step, we remove that and keep going and on and on until you get to the eventual end action you're truly looking for.

These are the different considerations and tools you need to build an effective conversion strategy for your Google Ads account.

First, you need to understand all those nitty gritty details of how setting up conversion actions actually works. Primary versus Secondary, actions versus goals, account defaults or not, and then campaign versus account level settings.

Next, you need to know how to actually see what it's doing in the interface, conversions versus all conversions, and segmenting by conversion action.

And then we can move on to deciding what level of intent we're going to track. Things that happen on the SERP versus things that happen on the website versus potentially things that happen off the website. 

And it's a balance deciding which ones make the most sense for your business. It could be different by campaign. It's not going to always be the same as your competitors. And it's something you should absolutely keep analyzing and adjusting over time so that you're feeding Google the data it needs so that it can give you the results you need.

A good strategy is about making choices. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for everyone, but now you're armed with the information you need to develop the best conversion strategy for your unique situation.

And of course, if you'd like my help personalizing this for your specific situation, you can book a call with me at jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A.

Be sure to subscribe or follow if you aren't already. Today, we explored trade-offs in your conversion strategy. And in our next episode, I'll be exploring trade-offs in your targeting and creative.

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales, and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.