How to Set Up Google Ads Conversion Tracking for Lead Form Submission (The RIGHT Way)

In this video, I'll show you how to set up Google Ads conversion tracking for form submissions the right way. A lot of people like doing it by clicks. I don't like doing that. I like doing it by a thank you or success page URL. You're going to need a Google Ads account tag manager and a landing page with a form submission that goes to a thank you page. I'm going to show you all of that in this quick video. It's super simple to do. By the end of this, you'll have correct conversion tracking set up. So let's dive in. Okay, so here's a page that we have. I want form submissions conversion tracking set up for, right? So you click this. This is going to take you to a form fill. And when you fill this out, you are going to land on a success page or a thank you page that looks like this. Okay, why do I like tracking form submissions like this? Two reasons. One, to me it's the cleanest way to track. There is no way some. And I'm going to have this URL blurred out. But there's no way anyone is getting to this page unless they go through our form submission process. When clicks are involved, it gets a bit gray because sometimes people click but don't actually convert and you'll end up with accounts you're auditing. And you're like, you guys had this many conversions. They're like, yeah, but we only had this many actual form submissions. Like, all right, well let's clean that up, right? Number two, when someone comes to your form and they fill it out, they're giving you their information, they're raising their hand and they're saying, hey, I want to talk to you. Right? Or they're interested in what your offer is. You think of everything you've done in your business to get a customer or a prospect to that place of actually submitting a form. And if you just simply have a pop up message that's like, thanks for your message, we'll get back to you. Which is what a lot of people do. It's like you just did all of that work to get them there and that's all you're going to give them. That's horrendous. Now that was a disappointment. So what you want to do just for the user experience standpoint is provide clarity. So here for our page we have a video on what are the next steps. We give them instructions. Cause this is actually for a phone call that they're signing up for to, to, to speak to us. About doing a Google Ads account review, then it's not done. We're still going to bake in the value that we have, the social value that we have, the experience and the success that we've had with many companies with Google Ads. Right, I'm going to put that in front of your face again. They've seen a lot of this throughout our sales funnel, but I'm not done because they haven't been on a call with us yet. So I've got to still get them to the finish line. So just because someone filled a form out doesn't mean it's done. In fact, a lot of people screw up, they get these form submissions, they'll not contact them for like a day. That lead is probably dead by then. Right? Well, she's no longer with us, so it's got to be super, super fast follow up. And some people you know won't. You'll have no shows. Right. This is part of helping actually solve no show issues too. So we give you good clarity in regards to what the next steps are after they fill that out. It doesn't matter what type of business you are. If I fill a form out, I want to know what the heck to expect. I'll give you an example. I filled out a form for a pest control company once. I had a B issue and it was literally like, thanks for your message, we'll get back to you. I didn't have time. I wanted these bees gone, right? So what did I do? I went and contacted the next competitor and actually in their case they had a text message option which I then text them and, and I loved that. Guess what? They text me back within like 10 minutes. It was perfect, right? Who did I end up hiring in that process? The company that literally got back to me in 10 minutes. The other company, they left me in limbo and I needed to solve my B issue right away. So I hadn't, I don't have patience to wait on them. However, if they had a thank you page when I first submitted and they're like, listen, we will get back to you by the end of today. Make sure your phone's on. Make sure, you know, here's our phone number that we'll be calling you, whatever. I probably would have waited for them because they looked like a good company. However, they left me in limbo. I'm not going to sit around. I've got a, I got a B issue to fix. So I went and contacted another company who contacted me quicker. So I know this is about form submissions but this is why I like doing thank you page. So let's hop into actually setting up the conversions. Okay, so I'm in a Google Ads account and you go to goals, right? And then you go to summary and then your going to see create a conversion action. So I'm going to go ahead and click this. Now I'm going to hit website. It does this thing where it makes you scan because Google wants like auto generate conversions for you. So do the scan and then just scroll down and hit add conversion actions manually. Okay. This is going to be a submit lead form for us. Obviously you can, you can categorize this however you want, but this makes sense for us for a submit lead form. Right. So we're going to, we're going to put that in there. Now you've got this option conversion action optimization options. You have primary, you have secondary. I actually have a video about primary and secondary conversions or macro and micro conversions. I will have that video in the description below if you want to learn more about that. Primary is what you're going to want. This on this, this allows smart bidding to learn off of this conversion. If I set it to secondary, it does not influence your smart bidding at all within your bidding strategies. So I'm going to have this set to primary. You should too if it's a form submission that you're obviously trying to set up. Now I am going to put account review. I, I use success a lot of times because a lot of our URLs will contain the word success. That means thank you. But we'll just put this for now and then I'm gonna do yt because this is YouTube so I don't want this actually living in this account since this is obviously for the YouTube video that I'm doing for you guys for the training. Now there's a value right? For us it's, it's a form submission. So we're basically going to set the value to one. So I don't need to do different values for each conversions. I don't have any dynamic actions taking place. This is just a form submission right now. So you can leave it like this. It'll fire a one because there's nothing that's going to pass back different values or you just set it here. So I've got that set to one count. I set this to one. It's a form submission. If someone were on this thank you page and maybe accidentally re, you know, loaded this page, it's possible the tag will fire again. Well, with lead form submissions we don't want every conversion counted if it's just one person. Right. So I just really want unique lead form submissions. And in that case I want one for count. Not every. Then you've got your click through conversion windows. In this case, I don't change any of this. Like our click through window is going to be fairly short. So 30 days is fine. The rest of these settings are fine. Attribution I leave to Data Driven. You really only have two options now. Last click or Data Driven. I yield to Data Driven these days and you should as well. Especially if you're going to be using smart bidding. Then we've got enhanced conversions. This is like a separate thing, so you can just leave that on for now. They're going to say enable and enhanced CPC to help increase conversions and campaigns currently using manual cpc. This is a little trick Google did. Dirty cheating snip. I have no idea why they would put this in a conversion action setup. But basically leaving this on is now turning on. If you have campaigns specifically manually bidding and some there are purposes for that. By the way, I have a full bidding masterclass so that video will be in the description below. This would change that over to enhance cpc. So this is changing your campaign settings. I'm just trying to build a conversion tracking action. Right. So this is a little sneaky trick by Google. They do a lot of that in their account settings to trick people into what they want, not what you want. So just turn that off for now. All right, I'm going to hit done. Okay, so here it is. You see Submit lead form, my conversion name, everything set up. I'm hit save and continue. Okay, so now you're at this spot where you need to set up, right? And they even have. You could email instruction instructions to your webmaster or your developer. We're going to go over to use Tag Manager. Okay. Now I already have a Tag Manager account. Tag Manager is correctly set up on our website. Very, very easy to do. I recommend utilizing Tag Manager if you're not a conversion linker tag here. Okay. And so this will actually take you to a support page in regards to conversion linker tag. In short, conversion linker tag is just able to detect ad click information in Your conversion page URLs and it stores this information in First Party Cookies and browser local storage on your domain for web pages and passes that data in URLs for AMP pages. Basically this is allowing Google to get more information. So when a site visitor takes an action that you you've tagged as a conversion, when A Google Ads conversion tag is fired. The click information is used to associate that conversion with the click that brought the visitor to your site. So you need this conversion linker in your account set up. Now, I already have that, but I'm going to show you how to do that real quick. All right, so I'm in the Google Tag Manager account right now for, for this. Okay. All you do is come here, hit new, and then if you hit tag configuration, it's Google already has this set up very easily. So here you just click conversion linker. And then you're going to want to name this Google Ads conversion linker. You don't have to name it like this. I just for obviously a naming convention that makes sense and is clean and organized. Now you want this to trigger on all pages. So here, and we've got a bunch of these pages, but you find all pages, boom, and you hit save. So that then creates the Google Ads conversion linker, which you'll need for any conversion action you set up in Tag Manager. So make sure you have that set up. Now let's set up the actual thank you page conversion. Okay, so again, I'm back in the tag area of Tag Manager. I'm going to hit new. And then now I've got my tag. I'm going to name it Account Form Submission. Now I'm going to put Google Ads in front of this as a naming convention. That way I know this is Google Ads related. Then we go to Tag configuration. Okay. And we're going to go to Google Ads and then we're going to do Google Ads conversion tracking. Then inside it's going to ask conversion ID and label. So going back to our tag, this information is right here inside of the tag setup instructions. So conversion id, I'm just going to copy that over and conversion label, I'm going to copy that over. And that's literally all you need for Google to know what tag you're trying to set up here. Conversion linker tag. Found a container. This is also checking. Do you have the conversion linker? So we set that up previous, so we're all good there as well. The rest of this stuff we don't need to worry about for this specific case. Triggering. Okay, this is where, where is this actually going to trigger? So you're going to hit this plus sign and then you're going to hit trigger configuration. And here we're going to do a page view and then you want some page views. Now on this you're going to want page URL and then you're going to want equals or contains for us, contains is fine. And in my case it's going to be. I'm going to take out a URL piece here because I don't want you guys to know my full. Just because some people will like check our pages out and then I get all this Invalid data from YouTube viewers when they're not, you know, so it's, it just skews the data. So this is going to be a different URL technically than what's on our page. But you get this, you get the process here. Basically all I'm trying is this is the unique URL which is a success page. Yours could, yours literally could just be as simple as like, thank you. Right, and then you want to obviously name this because. And what you're naming here is the page view. So it's going to be account review success. And then we'll just do page view. And then I'm going to hit save. Right? So that gets saved. This is then, just to reiterate, we've got Google Ads account review form submission. Yt this is the same name as my tag that I just set up in Google Ads. Then we've got conversion linker set up correctly. We've got the ID of the conversion and the label, which again we found inside of Google Ads, inside of that conversion action we set up. And this is triggered by a page view. This page view is the page of our thank you success page. Again, no other way of getting to that page unless you go through our form submission process. So this thing is ready to roll. We're going to hit save. Okay, now you can test this, right, to make sure this is all set up correctly. So you're going to hit preview. This is going to take you to basically a preview mode of pages that you can implement or include. So I'm going to put our page in again, this is probably going to be blurred out a little bit. Then I'm going to hit connect. So this is going to fire and this fires our page and it also gives like a UTM here saying it's GTM debug. So that's good for your analytics purposes. Then I just hit finish and I hit continue. Now it's going to show what tags fired in this case. Look at this. Google Ads account review form submission yt Bam. That means this is set up correctly. So this in this case would now push the conversion back into Google Ads. There you go. Simple setup for form submissions for conversion, tracking Google Ads. Somewhere on this screen there's going to be a video for primary versus secondary conversions that I did a video on. We're on the topic of conversion tracking. You should go check that video out next if you want to learn more about the primary versus secondary setting during that conversion build out process. If not, no worries. I'll see you on the next video.