A Beginner’s Guide To Google Ad Tracking
Google ads allow marketers the opportunity to reach over 3 billion Google users every day, whether through search, email, or social media.
Each search query creates a search result that is an opportunity for you to get you and your products in front of the people looking for those search results.
Setting up a Google ad for your stuff and learning what to track and what the information means sets you up better to control your leads, conversions, and sales.
What Google Ads will let you do is advertise and promote your products, and when done right, it can significantly increase your return on investment or ROI.
A Brief Overview Of Google Ads
Before we get into why tracking your Google ads matters, since this is a beginner’s guide, let’s talk briefly about what google ads are, okay?
Google ads can be great if you get them and bid on them just right. But get it wrong, and you could end up spending a ton of money as a result. So understanding how these ads work, tracking them, and getting better results is really important for both newbies and veterans.
So let’s talk about how Google ads work.
How Google Ads Work
Google ads are paid online ads offered through Google.
The way it works is that when users search for something, they use keywords that produce results based on those search terms.
When you run an ad that includes specific keywords or terms, your ad will appear at the top of the search results page.
Ideally, the higher the placement for the results, the more traffic your ad will receive.
So what you want to do is have your ads be the best result for keyword searches that people are typing into Google.
Google Ads works as a pay-per-click (PPC) model. What that means is that you are targeting specific words and terms and making a bid on how much you’ll pay to get your ad to be the result when those terms are found.
One problem with how Google does things is that you’ll be competing with other marketers for the same terms and keywords.
So, say you’re bidding on a search term, and your maximum bid is $4. Let’s say that Google determines that the cost per click is actually $2.50, which means you get the ad placement you want.
But, if Google decides it will cost more than $4, the ad placement goes to a competitor.
Now that you understand the bidding process, let’s look at the types of ads you could run and track with Google Ad tracking.
Different Types Of Google Ads
When you make your bids on a search term, there are three types of options you have.
Cost-per-click: CPC ads are based on how much you pay for the results when a person clicks your ad.
Cost-per-mille: CPM is a term to describe how much you pay per 1000 impressions for your ad.
Cost-per-engagement: This option is how much you pay when a user converts on your ad, such as signing up for an opt-in page, signing up for a webinar, or heading to a landing page.
There are different campaign types to use in your ads. For example, you can select to use a search campaign, display campaign, shopping campaign, video campaign, or App campaign.
The Two Types Of Campaigns You Should Focus On
Depending on your need and desire, the best type of campaign to use is a search campaign. Why search campaigns?
Search campaigns appear at the top of the results page as text similar to organic search results. They are the most common of ads and ones that you probably have seen multiple times without even knowing it.
Display campaigns are another excellent option for most marketing campaigns. A display campaign appears as a banner on third-party websites and even in emails through Gmail.
The advantage of display campaigns over other ad options is that they offer a much larger reach since Google is the largest search engine in the world. In addition, they partner with over 2 million websites and reach more than 90% of all web traffic, which is pretty awesome for you to get your ads in front of people.
Suppose you’re overly particular or prissy about how much you control your brand imaging. In that case, you may want to consider a different option than display ads since you don’t have any control over where your display ads appear, but in general, they can really boost your brand reach and profile.
How To Track Google Ads
Okay, so now you have a grasp of the basics, and if you did before that’s great, it was reviewed. Like back in high school cramming for a final when you didn’t study at all for the whole year and at the review found out you knew a lot more than you thought but also learned a lot.
That said, now that you understand Google Ads, the next thing is to understand how to track your Google Ads.
Under the GA platform, Google likes to track ads as conversions. This is great because conversions are the name of the game, and while Google likes to call its tracking as conversions, the problem with it is finding the right attribution to the ad that should get credit.
Let me explain. When you get an ad that converts, Google will look at the ad that you ran as the only reason your ad converted.
The problem with that is you may have been running a lot of ads and ad types that got someone to look at your stuff without converting until they found this most recent ad. So Google would give credit to the most recent ad when really, it was something the visitor saw months ago and your recent ad simply reminded them.
It’s like being in a group project at school and doing 95% of the work and then somebody in the group signs only their name and gets all the credit.
Okay, so Google will track your ads, but not the entire way. To do that, and the only thing I know of to do it correctly is with Hyros.
So Google will track your ads as conversions and offer you two types of conversion reports.
The first thing they track and report is primary conversions. These are the types of conversions that are directly related to your ad’s main goals.
They are the types of conversions that credits when a person clicks your ad for an opt-in or sales call. Usually, these lead to some revenue for your business.
The second tracking report is called a secondary conversion. These conversions are the type that are more passive and long-range to getting and increasing your revenue.
For example, you run an ad and a person clicks to subscribe to a newsletter.
Maybe they watch a video and offer comments on your blog. Their actions get them into your funnels but are not directly tied to a sales call yet.
Okay, so what you want to do is decide what to track about your conversions and then decide what way you’ll track those. Are you only tracking website conversions? Are you only tracking sales calls? What is it that you want to know about your ad conversions? Google will track these for you so you can analyze the results.
How To Make Tracking Data Work For You
Once you understand what it is that you want to track about your Google Ads, the next thing is to understand why it’s important and how to make the data work for you.
Tracking your data is important for you to analyze what ads are performing and those are the ones you should scale, and to see what ads just aren’t doing their jobs.
By tracking your ad performance and data insights, you can better;
Measure your ad success
Gaining insights and data about what ads are performing and what aren’t lets you know where to put your money for your ad buy. This information will help you scale effectively and get a better ROI.
Gain insights to better optimize your conversion rates
Seeing what is working for you and what isn’t will help you decide what and how you want to improve your ad targeting. The better your ad targeting, it will help you optimize your ads to increase your conversion rates.
Finding the best conversions
You could spend a lot of money on your ads and get a ton of traffic and comments on your blog. If that’s something you dig, good for you. But if you want your ads to help generate sales, you’ll need the data from tracking that lets you see the types of ads that are sending traffic your way and whether they are meeting your conversion goals.
For example, you’re running an ad for a high-ticket product and you get a ton of traffic to your landing page but no clicks. What’s happening? Well, the biggest culprit is probably your ad sending the wrong traffic to your page. Instead, you could tweak your ad so that people clicking are the ones ready to convert.
See places to make changes
By tracking the conversions of your ads, you’ll be able to see people’s behaviors better so that you can customize your ads to fit where and how people are clicking your ads. If you have a Google Ad and Instagram ad running and see a lot of clicks from Instagram, then you should drop the Google Ad and focus your efforts on what is already working.
Tracking your data and ad conversions is crucial to your ad success.
But too often people think that if they track their ads only with Google that they’ll have all the information that they need to make better choices. That’s just plain wrong, so wrong that it hurts.
Instead, you need to be able to track every aspect of why a customer converted. Was it the ad they just saw?
Was it an email that retargeted them from a blog post they saw a month ago?
Or was it something else they came across recently, maybe they had seen a YouTube video and wanted to click but the kids came home all wound up, running around like tyrants and knocked over a vase, and they had to go clean it up so they got distracted, and the most recent ad just struck a chord and reminded them?
So you need to track every way that you have interacted with a customer. And Google won’t do this, okay. You need to get tracking data and information so that you aren’t wasting your time focusing on your ads that Google says are performing well when maybe they aren’t.
Instead, you want to track every aspect of your ad campaigns. And the best way to track your ads that I know of is with Hyros. With Hyros you can track your ads all the way back for months to see how the lead first came around to when they converted and every step along the way. That tracking information is vital to you to be able to scale your ads correctly and put your money where it will do the most amount of good for you.
So check it out and book us a call. Ok, that’s it, I hope this beginner’s guide to Google Ad tracking helped.
But if you’re really serious about getting the best tracking for your ads, Google is a little limited. But with Hyros you’ll get detailed reports that show what you want is performing well and what isn’t and best of all, you will increase your ROI by 20% to 30%, or it’s free. So you have nothing to lose to check it out so book a call today.
Oh, and if you’re interested in a deeper conversation about ad tracking and ad scaling, you should check out our Facebook mastermind, there is over $50 million in ad spend in that group, and it’s loaded with all sorts of strategies.
Also, if you want to learn more, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel where I go over all this stuff daily.
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If you are interested in obtaining the same stats I showed in this video and even having us help you set this up, GO HERE to get more information on HYROS.
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HYROS Facebook Group
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