Google Ads Assisted Conversions Report

The Google Ads Assisted Conversions Report, can help advertisers figure out the true impact your campaigns may be having. It’s quite possible that people aren’t ready to convert by clicking on one ad or viewing one YouTube video. So, it’s always good to drill down to certain dimensions to see are these campaigns actually making a difference, are they actually driving conversions down the road even if it wasn’t a last click conversion. So, we’re going to run through where this tool lives within Google Ads and all the information that you can so you can make those decisions yourself.

I know I probably don’t have to say this but it’s still worth mentioning. In order to look at assisted conversions, you have to have conversion tracking set up within your Google Ads account. So, in order to do that, head on up to your Tools & Settings and then under. Measurement, you will see conversions. We have a couple videos going over a few ways that you could set up conversions within Google Ads or in a different video like the one that you can watch right here. You can learn how to import your conversions from GA4. But to see assisted conversions within your Google Ads account, you can stay within the measurement column. Just head on down to attribution.

Assisted conversions is just one part of the attribution section within Google Ads. So, if you just want to view assisted conversions, head on over to the left navigation and there you can click on the assisted conversions option and then, there’s a couple things I want to go over before I really start diving into this report. The first is going to be this yellow bar. I do want to dismiss it, but before I do, it’s good to understand the report will include cross-network data. In Google states, the requirements to have cross-network reporting is that you must advertise on Google search and then you also must advertise on either YouTube or the Google Display Network. This particular account meets these requirements so I’m going to dismiss this and second, the first time we entered in this report, we were defaulted to the campaign level dimension. So, there we see dimensions campaign. There’s my campaign column header with the three blurred out campaigns.

I purposely used a smaller account just to make it easier to see. But if you are working in larger accounts with a lot of campaigns, there is a search function if you only want to filter in on certain campaigns or you can also use a filter functionality, and there you can search for particular campaign names or the network that the campaign may belong in. We can also see moving up a little bit to the top right that we were defaulted to the last 7 days, but feel free to change the date range. For me, I’ll just choose last 30 days, which I know, I just could’ve clicked on the blue link and since we added about three more weeks, we clearly have more numbers to show.

Alright, now let’s look at the columns. Besides our dimension, the first one is last click conversions and that’s what we have the report sorted by. So, a last click conversion means that your ads were the last interaction a user had with your brand before they converted. So, we have the total of the last click conversions and then, the conversion value. This account is lead gen. If you have an Ecommerce Google Ads account, you have your revenue tracking set up properly. You’re going to see larger value numbers with a spot. Next, you’ll see Click & View Assist. These types of ad interactions could be clicks or maybe the newer YouTube engage view conversions. If you don’t know what those are, I created a video couple months ago about them. You could check that out here. These Click & View Assists occur when someone did interact with your ads but it wasn’t the final step before conversion. It was at some point earlier along their journey to conversion.

So, for example, let’s say you are running some robust YouTube campaigns and they’re engaging with your video ads enough that it’s going to count as a view. So, they’re watching your video long enough or maybe they’re clicking on your companion banner or call-to-action extension. But within those sessions, they did not convert and if that user later on goes on to search for one of your keywords and converts via one of your search ads, those two YouTube interactions would both get a click and view assist and then, the search campaign would receive the last click conversion. So, like I just explained in the example, it is possible to have several assisting actions before a last click conversion is recorded. That is why Google gives you this final column for the assist to last click conversions ratio. It’s literally taking your Click & View Assist divided by your overall last click conversions.

So, as we already know, we’re looking at things at the campaign level and since I am ignoring the value columns, I can potentially see if these campaigns are providing more value than just the last click interaction, but we can look at more options than just the campaign level. So, if I hop on to mention, we can review assisted conversions in a variety of different ways. You can choose network so that’ll show you Google search, display, YouTube. Next, you can look at assisted conversions by campaign type. We already have campaign. I’m going to uncheck this and then some of the more common ones help you get a little bit more specific like we can look at things at the ad group level. If I click apply, then, I start to get more options. To get more specific information especially since my ad groups are pretty tight themed. If I want, I could go back up. Keep the campaign dimension hit apply and if I squeeze these together there it’s telling me I have a couple dimensions selected. So, that just could be easier for me to see depending on how you’re naming all your ad groups and campaigns.

If I open this up again, we could go down to the keyword level. Click apply and once I added keywords, I still have these other dimensions selected. It is also giving me a match type column. Let me go back up and change it again, except of all these and then I’m going to choose device. I wanted to go with this one because I know I wouldn’t have to blur out anything. I know this account is reaching a very specific industry, so we do a lot better with our last click conversions. But in other accounts when using this report, we have seen certain last click conversion columns be very low. While the click and a view metrics have been a lot higher. In a lot of cases, these accounts have higher price items where a user may not be ready to convert after clicking on one ad and visiting your site one time.

Depending on your industry, it could take several times for that user to build trust or just make a decision if looking at other brands. So, besides the device view that we’re looking at right now, we do go over several of the different dimensions to see if certain quote unquote underperforming campaigns are actually providing more value than we can see from direct or last click conversions. So, since we are looking at device, we do have clients every once in a while, and say, “We’re not seeing a lot of conversions coming from mobile. We really need to turn mobile off or really bid down on mobile”. But in a lot of those cases, we could see that mobile is a really great discovery tool where many people do come back and convert. So, we can download these reports, send them to our contacts, and show mobile still has a good amount of value.

So, we can try to get more of these users to introduce the brand or it’s just good proof to say, hey, we are driving relevant traffic. They’re not converting right away. Maybe you need to fix your mobile experience so they would want to convert right away. It all depends on what type of brand you are and what your goals are for Google Ads. I know there is one more creative. I’d pretty much have to blur out everything and all the conversions are coming from unnamed search ad right now, so there wouldn’t really be much to show here. I’m going to clear this out or at least get it back to the default campaign option and then we can cover the conversion action because throughout this video so far, I was on the default all actions included in conversions, but we have more options.

So, the conversion action we’ve been using throughout this whole demo so far was all actions included in conversions. These are just the conversions that we have selected for our particular campaigns, but you may notice that the one right below it, all actions has the same number. I’ll explain why. All actions, if I head back up to tools and settings, all actions will include everything that you have set up or imported into this conversion section within Google Ads. Alright, let me clear this out. Now, all actions included in conversions may not be everything that you have set up. We can now choose campaign level conversions and in the campaign creation process, you could tell Google which conversions you want to use for certain campaigns.

In this account’s case, we are using all the conversions that we have set up in the account for our campaigns. That’s why the numbers the same but if you aren’t using every single conversion that you have imported or set up, there could be a difference between these two numbers. The next five rows are blurred out because they are individual conversion actions. So, you can hand select just one conversion action that is set up within Google Ads, and there we see the numbers have changed. Of course, it’s going to be smaller because it’s just one conversion action not all five and we knocked our last click conversion total by almost half. This is the main conversion action that pretty much gets around 60% of all conversions on the site and then yes, you can also go back, change your dimensions, and get really specific again just for this one conversion action.

So, you can see how you can go down some rabbit holes and get very specific information, but maybe your business gets a lot of phone calls. If you have your phone assets set up with your ads, you’re getting calls from ads. You can look at that too. This account doesn’t get much but we know there are a lot of businesses out there who really rely on phone calls. So, you can really see if your campaigns are driving more phone calls but I’m just going to head back up to all X.

And last, you can adjust the look back window. So, you can adjust how far back you want to go for the add impressions to be taken to consideration before a conversion. The default was 30 days and that’s what we had throughout this entire demo, but maybe your company has longer sales cycles. It takes users much longer to make a decision about your product than maybe just buying a T shirt randomly. So, you can adjust it to a 60-day window or maybe even a ninety-day window. I did this on purpose because I know this account in particular a couple months ago was specific YouTube and display campaigns before they switch to their holiday messaging.

So, while the YouTube and display campaigns didn’t see any last conversions within the past 30 days, they did see 9 total click and view assist conversions within the past 30 days and those interactions came within the past 90 days because this account isn’t something like buying $10 sunglasses. This is spending thousands of dollars for a training program. Not something you buy right away or potentially buy immediately off of scene one video ad or clicking on one display ad. So, besides audience visits that we layer in our search campaigns, we also look at the assisted conversions and this better helps us prove that we’re still influencing people’s decisions. We’re still introducing the brand to make them aware of what services we offer and then, they’re going back through other means either through our ads or other channels to convert eventually.

No matter how you’re viewing your reports, breaking them down, which conversion actions that you’re using. If you find any valuable information that you want share, you can always click on the download button to download this particular report. But if you’re looking for more ways that you could prove the value of the ads that you are running to your boss or to your client, be sure to check out your assisted conversions report every once in a while. You may run into a scenario where you should say, hey, maybe we shouldn’t have shut off this particular YouTube campaign because it was influencing people to eventually convert or yes, that one search campaign was expensive but it helped us bring in an initial target audience that eventually. You won’t know until you review the data. If you have any questions on how the Assisted Conversions Report works or what some of the metrics may mean, please let us know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez