Conversion Tracking: Optimize Your Advertising Campaigns (Google Ads, Facebook Ads...)

Conversion tracking is useful if you have implemented advertising campaigns to attract more visitors to your site.

This option allows you to prioritize ads for visitors who are most likely to become customers. This helps you increase the number of leads (via the Form module) or the number and amount of sales (via the Store module), thereby increasing the profitability of your advertising campaigns.

This system is compatible with all platforms that allow you to set conversion goals. For example, this is the case with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads...

Conversion tracking is available for Unlimited Showcase sites (conversion on form responses) and Unlimited E-commerce sites (conversion on sales).

Conversion tracking works through an HTML code (also called a tag) that is activated at the time of an action to indicate to the advertising system that the current visitor (coming from an ad) has just performed a contact or purchase operation.

This tag is created by the advertising system.

Creating Conversion Goals

This operation must be done with the advertising provider. 

Google Ads

Go to Goals > Overview > New conversion action.

Then follow the steps to create the goal (use the manual mode to configure everything):

Sales Goal (Store module)

• Website conversion type
• Purchase category
• For the value, choose to use different values for each conversion. The sale value will be automatically sent by SiteW. You can enter any default value.
• Count: choose All (visitors who order regularly will be favored)
• Leave other settings (delays) as is or adjust them

Contact Goal (Form module)

• Website conversion type
• Contact category for a contact form
• For the value, you can skip it or use a single invented value. If you offer multiple forms, the most important thing is that the value is properly prioritized. For example, a request connected to an event registration form has more value than a request connected to an information request form.
• Count: choose One to get unique leads
• Leave other settings (delays) as is or adjust them

Other Advertising Systems

The logic is the same for Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Taboola... Follow the service’s help to create a goal and obtain the tracking code.

Implementing the Tracking Tag

You have 2 possible methods to activate a tag: with Google Tag Manager or with the tracking code.

The method via Google Tag Manager is generally preferred by agencies or Google advisors.

Method Using a Tracking Code

In general, the system gives you two codes:

• A code to insert on all your pages

It is often stated that this code should be inserted into the head, but you can ignore this instruction. Use the Widget Code module and add this code in the background.

• A trigger code

This code must be inserted into the module’s configuration.

For the Form module, the box is located in the properties. 

For the Store module, it is found in the payment methods configuration. The code you were given normally includes an example of the order value. The number must be replaced with the word TOTAL. This will allow the order value to be sent.

Method via Google Tag Manager

This method is more complex to implement. It is generally configured by Google advisors.

For Google Ads, you must insert:

• A Conversion Linker tag with a “All pages” trigger
• A Google Ads conversion tag. This must be connected to a purchase event (Store module) or generate_lead (Form module).
  • For a sales tag, you must create a data layer value variable that contains the order value and, in the tag configuration, choose this variable as the value.
  • For a contact tag, you can configure the trigger so that it only applies to forms with a particular name.

Google Tag Manager also allows you to activate less standard conversions on particular steps of the purchase process (add to cart, cart visit...) or site visits. SiteW sends a data layer event SiteWPageView that contains additional information about the step (variable, path, detail...). Google Tag Manager also offers standard events such as clicking a button, scrolling the page, changing pages, etc.

Use the Google Tag Manager preview tool to check which interesting events are sent by SiteW according to your customer’s journey.

Optimizing Your Campaigns

Once the tags are installed, it will take several sales or contacts for them to be detected by the advertising system. Once this happens, you can modify the bidding type for your campaign. 

Sales conversions allow you to choose the following strategies:

• Maximize conversion value: For a given budget, the system tries to generate the highest total sales amount.
• ROAS: The system uses your budget as long as it remains profitable beyond a certain level. You must set the minimum profitability percentage. 100% means the total sales generated will be fully reinvested in buying new ads.

Contact conversions allow you to choose the following strategies:

• Maximize conversions: For a given budget, the system tries to generate the greatest number of contacts from different visitors.
• CPA: The system uses your budget as long as the new contacts do not cost more than an amount you choose. Generally, the smaller the indicated amount, the harder it is to reach a large number of customers. This figure must therefore be optimized to ensure you get enough contacts.

Consent for Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking sends personal information about the visitor to the advertising provider. For European visitors, this therefore requires asking for consent. This operation is performed via the GDPR configuration (in the Audience measurement section).

Thus, not all visitors who perform a conversion on your site will necessarily be tracked and counted in Google Ads. For the ad targeting optimization algorithm to work properly, it’s important to receive enough conversions, but not necessarily all of them (more than 100 conversions in the last 30 days).

Campaign Profitability

Keep in mind that the conversion tracking system is not perfect for guaranteeing the profitability of your ads. Several factors influence profitability, positively or negatively.

• Lack of consent reduces the number of conversions. Thus, the actual profitability is higher because some sales that took place via ads are not counted. The advertising system may offer an option to compensate for this gap.
• When a sale occurs, keep in mind that the sale value does not correspond to your margin. Moreover, this margin can differ depending on the products sold. This lowers the profitability of your campaigns.
• When a customer places an order on your site, they may become a regular customer in the long term. This is taken into account initially, but the tracking information will eventually expire, and your customer can order and be more profitable without having to go through your ads.
• Some campaigns, especially those targeting your brand name, may generate sales that would have happened anyway without the ads.