Ad tracking is the process of collecting data and user insights on the performance of online advertising campaigns.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool provided by Google that helps website owners understand how visitors engage with their site. It is free to use and offers a number of features, including e-commerce reporting, conversion tracking, real-time reporting, and more. It also provides data on page views, visitors, bounce rate, and other information.
Google Analytics can be integrated with Google Ads to create and review online campaigns. This integration allows users to track landing page quality and conversions (goals). Goals might include;
- Sales,
- lead generation,
- viewing a specific page, or
- Downloading a particular file.
Google Analytics’ approach is to show high-level, dashboard-type data for the casual user and more in-depth data further into the report set. Google Analytics analysis can identify poorly performing pages with techniques such as funnel visualization,
- Where visitors came from (referrers),
- How long they stayed on the website, and
- Their geographical position.
Google Analytics e-commerce reporting can track sales activity and performance. The e-commerce reports show a site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics
- Never intended to be an analytic solution
- Keep track of everything right up to the click
- After the click, Google ads only know about conversions.
Analytics tells us
- Which ads are delivered to returned visitors
- What steps took place that forwards to the path to conversion
Conversion tracking
When you run ads with Google Ads, you may want to see whether clicks on your ad led a customer to take a certain action, such as a purchase on your website, calling your business, or downloading an app.
The first step in tracking conversions is choosing what you want to track.
What is conversion?
Conversion is simply when your target audience takes the desired action you want them to take.
A conversion is what you define it to be, from going to a landing page to clicking on a product you sell for more information
What is conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking is a free tool that shows you what happens after a customer interacts with your ads — whether they purchased a product, signed up for your newsletter, called your business, or downloaded your app. When a customer completes an action that you’ve defined as valuable, these customer actions are called conversions. Conversion tracking;
- Helps to keep track of sales and leads
- Helps us invest in our campaign intelligently
- Determines if our efforts are profitable
Before getting started you need to know
- What is your conversion?
- Where does the conversion happen?
Thank you for page loads – conversion tracked – ads receive credit
Setting up conversion tracking
Conversion tracking starts with you creating a conversion action in your Google Ads account. A conversion action is a specific customer activity that is valuable to your business. You can use conversion tracking to track the following kinds of actions:
The most important factor you must look at in your Google Analytics conversion data in order to determine the success of your campaign is where the conversions are coming from and what events triggered them
The more you understand what drives sales, the better your campaign focus will be since ad campaigns are all about driving sales.