Common Conversion Tracking Errors & How to Fix Them

Unless you’re running a brand awareness campaign, conversion tracking is imperative for you to be able to see the results that you’re getting from your paid media campaigns. That said, there are a lot of really cool controls you can have within conversion tracking, but that also means that sometimes it can get a bit advanced and get a little bit confusing.

So in this video, I want to run through a handful of the most common conversion tracking mistakes we see whenever we’re auditing or taking over an account. That way, we can help you make sure that you’re not making those same mistakes.

The first mistake I want to start with is kind of a cheat, but it still applies. Not having conversion tracking is a huge mistake, in my opinion. In nearly every case of an account that we manage, have looked at, have heard about from somebody else, there’s an objective to the advertising.

And without having insights into whether or not your campaigns are achieving those objectives, it’s nearly impossible to make sure that you’re getting the value out of the time and money that you’re spending on those paid campaigns. So the fix for this one is pretty darn simple.

Set up your conversions, go into the platform, get them taken care of, and set them up. If you’re looking for Google Ads Insights specifically, which is the platform we’re going to be using for this video, we already have a video put together that you can see the title card for right here on the left that walks you through how to set up website conversion tracking for Google Ads.

I’ll throw the link for that video at the top of the screen so you can go there right now. But the long story short for this first one, set up your conversion tracking, get it taken care of, and make sure that you have some numbers in the platform to optimize on. But before you go off and start setting up conversion tracking, maybe stick around for the next five problems just so you can make sure that you don’t make those mistakes while you’re setting up your conversions. Let’s hop into the second one!

Not tracking all of the available conversion actions on a landing page or website can provide false negatives to how your campaigns are performing. One of the best practices of putting together landing pages for paid media campaigns is to have a single focused call to action on that page. But that doesn’t mean that every page only has one call to action.

And additionally, users can almost always navigate to your main website or other pages of your site away from that landing page. And I have yet to see a website where there’s only one call to action throughout the entire website, let alone just the one landing page. So go through your landing page and see what all calls to action you have.

Do you have a purchase but also a demo request and a content download? What about going through your entire website? Are there a number of different calls to action that you have available on different pages of the site that, even though you might not be directing users to those on the landing page, they still would qualify as generating value for your company either through a purchase or lead generation?

Make sure all of those actions have separate conversion tracking set up within your account so you can optimize your campaigns while still seeing if they are providing value to you in one way, shape, or form. And at this point, I’m going to hop into the Google Ads interface to hopefully get you started thinking about all the different types of conversions you could track.

I’ve skipped through all of the original setup pieces for creating a new conversion action because the only thing I really want to show you is this goal category for this conversion action; here is a list of very common calls to action that you can utilize in Google. In the sales category, we have Purchase, Add to Cart, Begin Checkout and Subscribe. In the Lead category, we have Contact, Submit a Lead Form, Book an Appointment, Sign Up, Request, Quote, Get Directions, Outbound Click, and then more categories, we have Page View and Other.

So if you’re stuck trying to think about all of the different conversion actions you might have somewhere buried on your website, and you just need something to jog your memory or get your creative juices flowing, check out this list. See if any of them match up. And if you remember seeing one on one page of your site or another, and then try and go find them and set up conversion tracking for all of them.

Now, as we’re going through this list, it’s leading me into the next problem with conversion tracking that we see fairly often. And you might already know it based on hopefully some gut instincts that you have as I went through these lists. A purchase is very clearly a conversion action because it provides value to your business. But an add-to-cart might be, but it also might not be.

You don’t get any value or any revenue when somebody adds something to your cart. It’s just a key action that person has taken. The same is true for Begin checkout and a number of these other actions like Get Direction, Outbound Click, and Page Views.

So with that, let’s jump to the next problem that we see pretty often within Google Ads conversion tracking. Tracking non-conversion events as conversions is basically the flip side of the previous problem. Here, we’re not missing out on certain actions being tracked. We’re actually counting too many things that are not providing value for our company are being tracked as conversions. And rather than having a false negative, we actually have a false positive going to our campaigns.

Now, as I mentioned, some of those lead categories might get you started down the path of thinking that some of those actions are conversions when they’re actually not. Here’s a common list of non-conversion actions that are being tracked that we’ve seen in a number of different accounts over the years’ page views being tracked as conversions. Not a specific page view like a thank you page or something like that, but literally anybody who views a page on a website.

More often than not, these are when people land on the landing page is usually the common error, which would effectively mirror the same type of stats as you would get for clicks. So just because somebody has landed on your landing page does not mean that’s a conversion; that’s simply a page view. You shouldn’t be tracking that.

The same types of things are true for a time on-site trigger that you can set up through Google Tag Manager or specific button clicks on the landing page. Again, if neither one of these are actually providing value to you, it’s not useful for you to track them as a conversion. The same would go for the last two that I have listed here, that might look like they’re providing value, but they’re really not.

First, is anybody submitting a support form? These are people who have already been working with you or have already purchased your product and need help trying to figure out how to use it or fix it, something along those lines. While that user might actually be submitting information to you, you should already have it. That’s why they’re part of the support system.

So although it is a form submission and you are getting information, this is effectively just duplicate content, and it’s not providing additional new incremental value for your campaigns. In a similar vein, somebody who downloads content is likely a good candidate to be somebody to go after a little bit more aggressively with sales. But if the content is ungated, then they got something for free, and you didn’t actually get any information.

So that shouldn’t be counted as a conversion because you didn’t get any lead information out of it. Now, I’ll take a step back, and while these actions shouldn’t be counted as conversions and optimized on, they might be things that you do want to track, and you want to see how these actions are happening in relation to your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, all that stuff.

Luckily, in the Google Ads platform, you can track conversions but not count them in the conversions column. So let’s hop into the Google Ads interface, and I’ll show you how to do that. To track actions but not include them in the conversions column, we need to stay in this Goal Action and Optimization section.

The setting isn’t showing up just yet because I haven’t chosen a goal category, so I’m just going to do select Lead form, and now we can see this conversion action optimization options, which is quite a mouthful. And you can see the arrow pointing down, which means there’s more information below it.

Here is where we can designate which actions are primary or basically used for bidding optimizations and included in the conversions column, and which actions are secondary, which are actions that you want to track but will not be utilized in the conversions column and will not be used in your bidding strategy for optimization.

So if you have any of those actions that you want, maybe that add to cart or specific page views for whatever reason, you would just need to open this carrot and then choose the secondary action. And then, you’ll see that those actions will be included in the all conversions column but will not be included in conversions.

This will help you still see those actions that people are taking, but make sure that you’re not utilizing them as false positives for your campaigns because you’re still focusing on optimizing only toward those primary conversion actions that are providing value.

The fourth problem is tracking all conversions equally. If you’ve been in this business a while, or if you’ve worked with more than one business, maybe in an agency capacity, you know that if you have a handful of different calls to action, they likely provide different levels of value to you and to your business.

The easiest example for this is to take an e-commerce website. If you sell more than one product and the price of those two products is different, then those conversion actions, even though they’re both purchases, provide different value to you because the user has paid you different amounts of money for each of the products. That one’s pretty simple.

If you’re buying a pair of shoes and a pair of socks, and the shoes are $100 and the socks are $20, there’s an $80 difference in the value of those conversions to your business. Lead generation is a little bit stickier. If somebody requests a demo and gives you all sorts of information about their business, then that’s probably a pretty high-value lead. But if all they do is download a piece of content and all you got is their first name, last name and email, that provides a little less value to you, but it still is a conversion action.

So what we need to do is assign values for each of our conversions. For Ecommerce, this is relatively simple. We need to utilize some sort of back-end system to dynamically pull in the revenue totals for each of those sales. If you utilize website builders like Shopify or something along those lines, those integrations can be relatively simple. But if you don’t have those systems or you’re utilizing a lead generation campaign, you might need to get a little bit more creative.

You’d need to review the long-term performance of your campaigns, determine average value for each call to action, and then set those up in the interface. You can also integrate your CRMs like Salesforce to import dynamic values for revenue based on different calls to action.

So we’re going to jump into the interface really quickly, and I’ll show you where you can add the values for your new conversion actions. In the same conversion action detail setup that we saw earlier, the third section down here is going to be around measuring the value of each of the different conversion actions.

So the most common mistake is going to be when people don’t use a value for the conversion action. As you can see from Google, that is not recommended, and that basically just means that the conversion value column is always going to show a zero. There’s not going to be any potential revenue associated with this conversion action.

Now, if you want to use the same value or basically keep it static for every time this conversion fires, you can choose this first option, and then you can enter the value associated with this conversion action. This would work if you have done the average potential value associated with a content download versus a request demo form.

Maybe you’ve come up with some sort of subjective number scale where a content download is worth $10, and a demo request is worth 100, or some other value more closely tied to your actual revenue. You would then just need to add in the value that you want for this conversion action in this field, and it will then assign $10 for every time somebody converts on this conversion action.

If you want to use dynamic values for each conversion, and maybe each one of these is worth different values to you, then as you can see here, you’ll see the steps to add dynamic values to your tracking code on the next page of this setup.

So I’m not going to go through that specifically in this section, but you will have the option to set up the codes to dynamically track revenue or an associated value based on your website. Even if you use different values for your conversion actions, you can and should set up a default value.

So just in case something happens and your code does not populate correctly, and it doesn’t assign a dynamic revenue number, you’ll at least have an average value of whatever this potential call to action could be. So if your average order value on an e-commerce site, let’s say, is $80, I would suggest setting up a purchase with a default value of $80.

That specific conversion might be lower, might have been worth more revenue or less than that $80 amount, but since the code didn’t fire properly, you at least have some value associated with the conversion action rather than just assuming it went back to zero.

The fifth problem focuses mostly on lead generation campaigns, and that is tracking duplicate leads. On an e-commerce site, when somebody comes to your website, and they make a purchase, you want that purchase to count as a conversion. If they come back two days later and they purchase again, you also want that to count as a conversion because it’s got additional revenue tied to it.

In lead generation, if somebody comes to your website and fills out a demo request form and then two days later comes back and fills out the same demo request form, you only want that to count as one lead because you only have one lead that came out of it. You did not get additional revenue out of that second lead because it was the same user, and you already have their information.

So in the conversion tracking setup, you can count the frequency with which you want a conversion to be tracked. So let’s jump in, and I’ll show you where that is. You probably saw it while we were talking about the value targets because I had it on the screen, but the frequency count for each conversion is going to live in this count section.

And just like I outlined in the slides, you have the option to choose every or one for the count of every time this conversion action runs. So again, if you’re utilizing an e-commerce website and you’re trying to track a purchase or add to Cart or whatever, you probably should use every. But if you’re doing lead generation campaigns and you’re tracking the same types of forms where you’re going to get the same information, you should use something more like one, which, as Google says down here, is recommended for leads, sign-ups, and other conversions, because only the first interaction is valuable.

These are the only options you have. So it’s super simple to just click between one or the other. But again, this is a common issue we see in lead generation campaigns where they left this count as ever, and they’ve been tracking two, three, four, sometimes upwards of five to ten different contacts with a person as a conversion, even though the first one was the only one that was actually valuable.

The last issue that we see on a regular occurrence is counting short phone calls as conversions. Depending on your business model, a phone call might be a great way to generate leads or make purchases. But in a number of accounts we’ve seen, very, very short phone calls counted the same as a very long phone call. And just like we talked about a little bit with the value of conversions, for lead generation, a demo request is more valuable than a content download usually.

And with phone calls, a longer phone call is usually more valuable than a short phone call. But even more than that, there’s a minimum length of time that somebody needs to be on the phone to actually generate a lead for your business. If you’re on the phone for 3 seconds, that’s very different than if you’re on the phone for 90 minutes.

And the issue we see more often than not is that people are counting those exactly the same and counting a three-second phone call as a conversion when obviously no information was exchanged. So to set these up, the first thing you need to know is our phone calls even valuable to you. Do you want to track these as conversions or not? And one way to do that is just to talk to Sales.

When people call in, do they ever convert? Do they become customers, or do they become a lead that will eventually become a customer? If they do, how long does it take the salesperson to gather that information to make them either become a lead or a purchaser?

Based on what the sales team tells you, you can utilize that length of time to set up your conversion goals to at least track phone calls that are likely conversions or have a better chance of being a conversion rather than all phone calls. Let’s hop back into the interface one more time and I’ll show you where you can set up the minimum length of time for a phone call as a conversion action.

I’ve gone a couple of steps back in the conversion tracking setup because originally I was using Website Actions, but for this one, I need to use phone calls, as you can see here, chosen phone calls as the main action, and then I get to select the source that I want the phone calls to track.

For this specific action and for this specific problem, I want to use the calls from Ads utilizing the call extensions or call-only Ads, because these are the ones that Google can track the phone call itself and can record how long that phone call is running. So I’m going to click Continue, and in this setup, we have a few different options. Up at the top, we can choose if we want this to be the primary or secondary action, like we talked about earlier.

So that’s really helpful to have that automatically in this builder section, unlike the other actions. And then, to set up the length of time, just want to scroll down here, and you’ll see that the default length is going to be 60 seconds for it to be tracked as a conversion. Basically, just add in the number of seconds it takes for your calls to be considered a conversion, or at least likely to be a conversion in this section. But again, know that the number is in seconds.

So if it takes an average of five minutes for somebody to be considered a lead through a phone call, you would need this to be 300 seconds because each minute is 60 seconds, and we need five of those minutes. So just remember that this is going to be in seconds, not any unit of minutes.

It’s a pretty simple fix, just like basically all of these other conversion tracking mishaps are. But if you’re going really fast or if you’re not paying attention, it’s an easy mistake to make and count something that is not a conversion as a conversion or completely miss out on tracking a really valuable action for your website or for your business.

So hopefully, this overview of these six common issues that we see time and time again in accounts and their solutions will help you get your account up to snuff and make sure that you’re optimizing only on the actions that provide value and not on the ones that don’t. If you have any other questions about conversion, tracking setup, or any of these individual settings themselves, feel free to leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan