How Conversion Tracking Works

Conversion tracking is a free tool that shows you what happens after a customer interacts with your ads -- whether they purchased a product, signed up for your newsletter, called your business, or downloaded your app. When a customer completes an action that you've defined as valuable, these customer actions are called conversions.

Why use conversion tracking

  • See which keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns are best at driving valuable customer activity.
  • Understand your return on investment (ROI) and make better informed decisions about your ad spend.
  • Use Smart Bidding strategies (such as target CPA, enhanced CPC, and target ROAS) that automatically optimize your campaigns according to your business goals.
  • See how many customers may be interacting with your ads on one device or browser and converting on another. You can view cross-device, cross-browser, and other conversion data in your “All conversions” reporting column.

How conversion tracking works

Conversion tracking starts with you creating a conversion action in your Google Ads account. A conversion action is a specific customer activity that is valuable to your business. You can use conversion tracking to track the following kinds of actions:
The conversion tracking process works a little differently for each conversion source, but for each type besides offline conversions, it tends to fall into one of these categories:
  • You add a conversion tracking tag, or code snippet, to your website or mobile app code. When a customer clicks on your ad from Google Search or selected Google Display Network sites, or when they view your video ad, a temporary cookie is placed on their computer or mobile device. When they complete the action you defined, our system recognizes the cookie (through the code snippet you added), and we record a conversion.
  • Some kinds of conversion tracking don’t require a tag. For example, to track phone calls from call extensions or call-only ads, you use a Google forwarding number to track when the call came from one of your ads, and to track details like call duration, call start and end time, and caller area code. Also, app downloads and in-app purchases from Google Play, and local actions will automatically be recorded as conversions, and no tracking code is needed.
Once you’ve set up conversion tracking, you can see data on conversions for your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Viewing this data in your reports can help you understand how your advertising helps you achieve important goals for your business.

Security and privacy for website tracking

Google's security standards are strict. Only pages containing the Google conversion tag are tracked through this program. We use data encryption and secure servers.
Please ensure you're providing users with clear and comprehensive information about the data you collect on your websites, and getting consent for that collection where legally required.
Note: If you have not obtained users’ consent for the collection, sharing, and use of personal data for personalization of ads where legally required, be sure to disable the collection of remarketing data. Learn how to modify the global site tag to disable the collection of remarketing data for specific users.

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