Google Ads Conversion Measurement & Others Updates: December 2021

In the very beginning of November 2021, Google Ads announced a few new updates on how conversions can be measured. In the first change, we’re going to talk about the newly introduced conversion goals when setting up new campaigns within Google Ads.

Second, tag assistant support is now available within the Google Ads platform. So we’ll cover that one. Lastly, we will go over explanations. This is a new feature which may help explain why there are certain fluctuations happening within your Google Ads account. So those are the three main changes, now let’s dive in.

So for the rest of this video, I’m going to go in order of everything I described within the intro. So the first thing we’re going to talk about is going to be conversion goals, and this occurs during campaign creation. I’m currently in the overview screen, so I can just head over to new campaign. But most likely, you also know you can create a new campaign from the campaign view as well.

First, you’ll need to choose your campaign objective, just to keep things moving. I’m going to select leads, and that’s what takes us down to a newer process within the campaign setup, and here we see the conversion goals. When you’re reviewing campaign information, you do have the option to segment campaign performance and review the data by conversion action.

The conversion actions that we see in this third column right here are the ones that you set up when you go into tools and settings, and then under measurement, there’s conversions. I’m going to open this up in a new tab so I don’t lose my place.

Sorry, I had to blur out the names of a few of these so you don’t know who this is, but each row is a conversion action. Whether it’s a form submission, we see phone calls at the bottom, pdf downloads, specific page views, whatever you have set up as each individual goal, that is a conversion action. But we can see that those conversion actions are grouped, and these are the conversion action groupings that we’re going to see when we head back into the campaign setup. So we see a grouping here for submit lead forms, we see a grouping here for phone call leads. Let me go into one of these conversion actions, so you can see where these categories are coming from.

If I go within one of the conversion actions, edit the settings, you can see the goal category can be updated. So these categories, whichever ones you select, when you’re creating the conversion action is going to be the grouping we see within the new campaign setup, so let’s head back to that screen.

So again, each row we see within the conversion goals is going to be the conversion category. The main benefit of this new setup is to help your bidding optimization. Helping Google know which actions your campaign should optimize towards. So in this case, I chose the campaign goal of leads.

So maybe I don’t want to include my bid strategy to optimize towards these other conversion actions. In this case, these are all pdf downloads. I can click on the more menu on the right-hand side, these three dots, and I can choose to remove this other category. There we see this campaign will no longer optimize for other, and that’s fine.

There we see the warning that instead of using account level goals for this particular campaign, it is only going to optimize to these two conversion goal sets. You can go up and restore it back to the account goals if you want to, but I don’t need to do that.

Within each of the conversion goals, you can choose which conversion actions can be used towards the bidding. We do this by indicating which actions are primary actions and secondary actions. So let’s head back into the conversion action settings that I showed you before.

When we were trying to edit this one conversion action, I first showed you the goal categories. But underneath that, we have optimization options. Anything labeled with a primary action will be used towards bidding optimization, and those conversion actions will be included in the main conversions reporting column.

If you choose to go with secondary actions, and I’m not going to click on it, they are not going to be used for bidding optimization. However, they will be included in the all-conversions reporting column. There is an exception if you’re creating a custom goal, but that’s a little bit advanced, so I’m not going to go over that.

Within Google Ads, you already have the ability to create campaign level goals, and we have another video on how to set that up. But by default, when you create a new campaign now, all of your account default goals will be selected for any new campaign you create.

Google does recommend that if you want to get the most cross campaign learning within the account, that all of your campaigns should have the same set of goals. Easiest example would be an e-commerce account. You’re trying to sell something, so odds are your main primary action you want to optimize towards would be a purchase or a transaction. It may not be as easy in certain lead gen counts if you’re focusing on different intent keywords, so it’s still okay if you have different conversion goal sets.

So the last thing I will say about this is that you can always revert to your account default goals. So if this campaign goes live, it’s running for a while, just go back into your campaign settings and you can update that.

Now, we can move on to the next topic and that is using tag assistant for troubleshooting. At this time, I jumped into the pay media pros demo account, and if we’re troubleshooting conversion actions, we need to head back up into tools and settings, and head back into the conversion section like we showed before.

When you’re looking at your conversion summary, if you ever see troubleshoot on the right-hand side under actions, that means something’s wrong with your conversion tracking, and conversion tracking is absolutely essential for running any successful paid media campaign. So this should be something that you would jump on immediately.

We need accurate tracking for our conversions at all times. Most likely, this troubleshoots link will pop up when the status says tag inactive like it’s showing right here or possibly unverified. When we click on troubleshoot, you will see this pop up to bring up tag assistant.

You see in the title, it’s going to help test this conversion action, thus, helping us verify if our conversion actions are set up properly on our websites or landing pages. If I head to another screen really quick, and I’m going to highlight this right here, you can go to tag assistant.Google.com and there you can pull up this tool for any account that you may have access to.

Very helpful for agencies if you’re managing other accounts. But if you’re already in Google Ads, why open up another page and then have to sort through the other accounts that you have access to?

Now we can use this tool within Google Ads. This makes fixing these issues quicker and easier. So this is a great move by Google, I love this one.

Okay, so let’s start fixing this conversion action, and we see the steps right here. First tag assistant will open a new tab, then we need to connect our website, test the conversion action. If everything looks good, we can close tag assistant, refresh the page and confirm that the action has been completed.

So let’s walk through each of these steps. I went to a different screen, I already pulled our URL, pasted it into the field. Now we can connect in a separate window, sorry you can’t see the tabs on top of my browser. Tag assistant sent us to the website, and this particular conversion action is going to be on the see us speak page. If I scroll down, there’s the form, I’m going to just fill this out really quick, and then I can submit it.

All right, so after the form is filled out, it redirects us to a thank you page and there we see tag assistant has updated. Book us to speak conversion action is sending data, and we see the little green check mark. I’m going to hop back into the conversion actions within Google Ads, and even though Google said you may have to refresh the browser, we didn’t.

Our status doesn’t show an inactive tag, it doesn’t say unverified, it just says no recent conversions. Because we used tag assistant, we tested out the form, Google smart enough to not include anything in our conversion columns.

If you’re in tag assistant, you’ve run through the conversion actions, and it’s still not firing off, this means you have more work to do. You’ll want to go into your conversion action, go down into your tag setup, and see specifically how you install the conversion tag if you’re not importing it from Google analytics.

So we talk about conversion tracking setup in a different video, you can watch that one right here. I will admit that video pretty much talks about using Google tag manager. In our opinion, that’s the easiest way to get Google conversion tag set up. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can watch that one here.

Then once you go update your tags however you have them set up, try something new, then you can always head back to this section, click on troubleshoot again and go through the same steps we just went through, to make sure that your tag is verified. The last update in conversion measurement that we want to talk about is going to be called explanations.

Now bear with me here, because there are a lot of rules in place to make explanations even visible within your account. To give you a little teaser, any of the blue links you see in these columns, those are what we can hover over to show up the explanations. But to even have them show up, you have to be comparing two different date ranges.

If Google’s going to try to explain you why changes occurred in your account, you have to compare two sets of data, and those date ranges need to be equal. So I’m looking at the last seven days compared to the seven days before that.

If you do some comparisons like this month versus last month, that possibly could not work. Because if I did last month November has 30 days, if I compare to the previous month before that, October, that has 31 days, that’s not the same amount of days. So that comparison will not work. You would have to take one of the days off of October, it seems silly, but that’s how it works. Not only that, you cannot include today’s date.

Whichever day it is that you’re watching this video, you always have to start by whatever yesterday is. Next is going to be depending on which view you’re looking at. So explanations will only show up if you’re on the campaign page or the ad groups page. You can’t look it at the ad level, can’t look it at the keyword level any of these other ones, just campaigns and ad groups.

Then last, I told you there was a lot. It depends on which campaign you are running, as well as the bidding strategy, and the two campaign types that you can use as of now will be search campaigns and app campaigns.

For search campaigns, I’m pretty sure that every bid strategy is available, it doesn’t matter which one you have to start seeing explanations. Again, if you’re on the right page and you’re using the proper date range. For app campaigns, you have to be using target CPA, so let’s look at one example. Even though I have the campaigns blurred out, I’m on the campaigns page, so we know the top row where we’re seeing stats, that’s just one campaign.

So let’s say I wanted to see why impressions increased about 22 and a half percent over the past seven days. I can head over to the blue percentage link. There, Google gives us the number increase as well as the percentage increase. But then, we see the blue link on the bottom for view explanations. If we click on that, we can hopefully get some information from Google about why these changes occurred. Learning why things happening in your account is so important.

So let me click on this one and there we see Google is checking for several factors. Their search interest, auction insights, change history. If you made any bid adjustments to your settings, your budgets, your bids and it does take a little bit to scan. There we see the same information about what changed over that time.

But as we scroll down, they checked all of these areas and really found no explanation. They are warning us that there are additional factors, if you made any changes to your website or to your ads that haven’t been checked, not too helpful. But usually, we would see some sort of explanation on what’s going on. Closed out of that one, that’s not a good example. Let’s use another one, because possibly this tool may be more helpful to you to try to fix any down performance within your account.

So let’s look at this one. This is a decent campaign in the account that converts really well. So when I see impressions going down for a campaign that has a really good cost per conversion, I might get a little concerned.

So in this case I want to see why are impressions going down on one of my best conversion rate campaigns. So Google did the same scanning, I skipped over that part, and now we have some different explanations. They’re saying within this time period, we added two negative keywords. Those negative keywords affected the impression share for this particular campaign. So that I can go back and review search queries potentially for this campaign, and see okay, yes, we did that for a reason. I understand my impressions went down, but they were junk impressions anyway.

If I scroll down a little bit more, they’re letting me know that this campaign had 34 percent less search interest. Less people were searching for keywords that are in this campaign, and they’re showing me a few of the search terms that were the biggest contributors to the decrease in interest.

I scrolled down to the bottom, I skipped over more, I would have to blur out pretty much everything, but they did break down those explanations by ad group and actually had some keyword level explanations too. Even though we can’t view this information on the keywords page, we still get keyword level information for this explanation, so that was helpful. But at the bottom, just reminding us where they found explanations on why performance changed, but then we see the other areas that were checked, what Google felt didn’t contribute to the change over those time periods.

Is this the most robust tool? No, but it’s still pretty helpful for free. There are other tools out there that can help you look for change reasons. But if you don’t have the budget to pay for those tools, this can at least point you in the right direction, if not give you the reason why performance has changed. Hopefully, answering some of your why did this happen questions.

Those have been the main conversion measurement changes that occurred within Google Ads lately. If there are any more announced that can help you better optimize your campaigns, we hope to cover them in future videos. I also understand that my run through for these three updates was pretty brief. So if you have any other questions on what I covered in this demo, please let me know in the comments below.

Written by Joe Martinez