Conversion tracking in Google Ads, step by step

Count the actions that are worth money to you: a purchase, a booked demo, a qualified lead, a call. Make those primary: Google Ads reports primary actions in the Conversions column and uses them for bidding. Make the small steps on the way, such as a page viewed or a button clicked, secondary: they are for observation only, in the All conversions column.

Where: Goals, then Conversions, then Summary: edit the goal that holds the action, then its conversion action optimization.

Either the Google tag on your site, directly or through Google Tag Manager, or an import of your Google Analytics key events, which Analytics used to call conversions. Not both as primary for the same sale: the account would count one sale twice, and bidding would pay for a sale that happened once.

• For leads, count One per click: a form sent twice is still one lead. For sales, count Every.
• In Google Analytics, watch each key event arrive in DebugView before you rely on it.

Where: Goals, then Conversions, then Summary: add a conversion action and pick your Google Analytics property to import its events.

The free audit checks this: C-12 Does the account count sales at all?, C-16 Counting the same sale twice.

Enhanced conversions add first-party data from your conversion page, such as the email address a buyer typed, hashed with SHA256 before it is sent to Google. Google says they can improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement.

Where: Goals, then Settings, then Enhanced conversions: turn them on, then choose the Google tag or Google Tag Manager to send the data.

A few days later, open the action from Goals, then Conversions, then Summary, and read its diagnostics.

Consent mode tells Google's tags what each visitor accepted. For visitors in the European Economic Area, Google's consent mode reference says the ad_user_data consent type is required for measurement, enhanced conversions and tag-based conversion tracking included.

ad_storage

storage, such as cookies, for advertising.

analytics_storage

storage, such as cookies, for analytics.

ad_user_data

sending user data for advertising to Google.

ad_personalization

personalized advertising.

Your consent banner sets them. Make a test visit with each choice, and check that your tags follow it.

When the ad brings a lead and the sale closes later, in your CRM or on the phone, send that sale back to Google Ads, or bidding keeps learning from leads instead of customers. Google gives every click its own ID, the Google Click ID (GCLID): store it with the lead, and import it with the sale. If you are starting out, Google recommends enhanced conversions for leads instead, which match the hashed details from your form.

Then set the action's click-through conversion window to cover how long your sales take. Left alone, it is 30 days; you can set up to 90, depending on the conversion source.

Where: Goals, then Conversions, then Summary: open the action, then Edit settings, then the click-through conversion window.

The free audit checks this: C-14 Sales arriving after the counting window closes.

Optional. With Google Tag Manager's server-side tagging, the measurement data is processed on a server you control instead of in the visitor's browser, and you decide how it is shaped and where it goes. It means hosting and set-up work: start once the first five steps count right, and run it beside your current tags until the totals match.