Set up conversion tracking before you spend a dollar

An ads account with no conversion tracking reports traffic. It tells you how many people clicked and what you paid, and it stops there. Whether any of those clicks became a job on your calendar is a question the account cannot answer, so you answer it from memory, and memory is generous about the weeks you were busy.

For a contractor the conversion is rarely a page view. It is a call at 7:40am from someone whose water heater failed overnight, or a form submitted from a truck cab in a customer's driveway. Neither appears in a clicks report, and the account cannot know either happened unless you tell it how to watch.

Google's automated bidding runs on the same information you do. The conversion actions you mark primary are what it optimizes toward. Launch before any of that exists and the system optimizes for clicks, because clicks are the only outcome it can see. You spend month one teaching an algorithm to buy the wrong thing and month two unteaching it.

Lesson 1 left you with an account that exists and does not serve. This lesson gives it a nervous system: the Google tag on your site, conversion actions for your form and your calls, Analytics connected without double counting, and proof from the account itself that all of it records.

A conversion is an action you would trade money for. That definition rules out most of what a dashboard offers to count. Time on page is not a conversion. A visit to your services page is not a conversion. For a business that sells jobs the list is short: a form submitted, a call placed, an appointment booked, a quote requested.

Measure the completion, not the attempt. A button-click conversion fires when someone presses Submit, including the times validation failed, the submission errored, or a bot pressed it. A page-load conversion on a dedicated thank-you URL fires only after the form went through, and it needs no code beyond the Google tag. If your site has no thank-you page, building one is the highest-value hour in this lesson, and it is a small web development job rather than an advertising one.

Every conversion action is either primary or secondary. Google's definitions: primary actions are "reported in the 'Conversions' column in your reports and used for bidding", while secondary actions "are for observation only... used for reporting in the 'All conversions' column in your reports, but not for bidding". Primary is for form fills and qualified calls. Secondary is for directions clicks, PDF downloads and page views. Mark everything primary and Google optimizes toward whichever is cheapest to produce, which is never the one worth money. One detail catches people: you set primary or secondary by editing the goal that contains the action, not the action itself.

The Google tag is one piece of code that sits on every page of your site and reports what happens there. If you read about this before 2023, you read about the global site tag. Same thing renamed: Google states that "the global site tag (gtag.js) is now the Google tag", and existing installations kept working without a rewrite. There is one tag, conversion actions attach to it, and events like the phone snippet are additions to it rather than separate products.

The tag and the conversion actions live in different parts of the account, which catches people. Conversion actions live under Goals. The tag lives under Tools, inside Data manager. Goals is what you are measuring; Data manager is the plumbing that measures it.

1. 1

   In the left menu, select Tools

   The left-hand menu is the only navigation in the current design: Campaigns, Goals, Tools, Billing and Admin.
2. 2

   Select Data manager, then Manage under Google tag

   This opens the tag itself, including its ID and its current state.
3. 3

   Next to Your Google tag, select Installation instructions

   Google offers three methods, and for most local businesses only one is worth considering.

Google lists 19 platforms with built-in Google tag support, covering where most local businesses already are: Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, Webflow, WooCommerce, GoDaddy, Duda and WordPress three separate ways, through Site Kit, MonsterInsights or the WordPress Editor. Anything not on that list installs manually.

4. 4

   Select your platform and copy the tag ID exactly as displayed

   Copy rather than retype. One wrong character produces a tag that installs cleanly and reports to nothing.
5. 5

   Paste the ID into your platform's Google tag field

   On Wix it sits in your dashboard under marketing integrations, in the Google tag card; other builders use a similarly named settings area. Two of the big ones carry a plan requirement: Wix needs a Premium site with a connected domain, Squarespace a Business or Commerce subscription. A missing setting is usually that rather than a bug.
6. 6

   Publish the site, load a page, and check the tag state in Data manager

   A tag that has never fired reports nothing, and every step after this depends on it firing.

Conversion setup lives under Goals. Google's own articles render the path two ways, abbreviating or spelling out the Conversions section in between, because Summary is that section's default page. Both land on the same screen.

One label to get right. The control on this page reads + Create conversion action. Most competing tutorials, and nearly everything written about this by an AI, still say "+ New conversion action", which was the older label. If your other tab says New, trust your screen.

1. 1

   Select Goals, open Conversions, then select Summary

   The conversion action table and everything that creates one live here.
2. 2

   Select + Create conversion action

   Google asks what kind of conversion you want to measure before it asks anything else.

3. 3

   Under Conversions on a website, select Edit data sources

   The website path changed here, and stale tutorials get it wrong. You no longer name an action first: Google frames this as three steps and starts with the data sources.
4. 4

   Enter your website domain and select Scan

   Three outcomes. Google finds the tag you installed and continues with it. It finds a Google Analytics property and offers to link it, with switches for importing app and web metrics and Analytics audiences, then Link and Done. Or it finds nothing and prompts you to set up a tag, which is the section above.

5. 5

   Select Automatically without code

   A page-load conversion on a dedicated thank-you URL is the most reliable setup available without touching code.
6. 6

   Choose the event type and write the URL rule

   Google offers URL is, URL contains and URL starts with. One clean thank-you address takes URL is with the full URL. A form that appends tracking parameters takes URL contains with the path fragment, for example /thank-you.
7. 7

   Name the action for what it measures

   "Conversion 1" and "Website lead" age badly. "Contact form, thank you page" still explains itself six months later.
8. 8

   Select the category

   Google's Leads categories are Qualified leads, Converted leads, Submit lead form, Book appointment, Sign up, Request quote, Get directions, Outbound click and Contact, with See all for the full list. A contact form is Submit lead form; an estimate request is Request quote. The category is how Google groups the action into a goal.
9. 9

   Set Count to One

   The default is wrong for lead generation, and the callout below is why. Leave Value and the conversion window alone: the click-through window defaults to 30 days, Google recommends at least 7, and 30 suits most trades.
10. 10

    Decide about enhanced conversions, then finish

    Google closes the flow by offering enhanced conversions and asking you to accept customer data terms first. The feature sends hashed customer data, such as email addresses, so Google can recover conversions the browser would otherwise lose. It is optional, and turning it on means confirming you have the right to share what your forms collect. Read the terms and leave it off until you have. Google has been consolidating these controls, so you may meet one switch or two.

Most of the money a contractor makes from search arrives as a phone call, and this is where almost every article blurs the detail. Google offers three mechanisms for counting calls. They require different things, they fail in different ways, and only two of them count a call at all.

The first counts calls from your ads. Someone taps the number in the ad and dials without ever reaching your site. Google substitutes one of its own forwarding numbers, routes the call straight to your real line, and counts a conversion once it passes a minimum length you set. It applies only if your ads carry a phone number, which you add when you build the campaign in Lesson 3.

Read the third row twice. The first two mechanisms measure calls; the third measures the intent to call. A contractor who sets up only the third and reports "we got 40 phone conversions this month" has 40 taps, some of them misdials, back-button bounces, and the same person tapping twice. Worth measuring, not worth calling a call.

The website options make the distinction explicit, and the labels decide what you get. The website route offers "someone calls a number shown on my website", which is true call tracking and needs the phone snippet, and "someone makes a call by clicking a number on my website", which is click tracking only. Google's pages word the three top-level phone choices inconsistently, so navigate by what you want to measure rather than by matching a label.

1. 1

   Turn on call reporting

   Call reporting is an account-level setting. Open Admin, then Account settings, and look for the call reporting control. Google has moved this setting before, so search your account settings rather than assuming it is gone.
2. 2

   Let Google create the default action

   Google states: "After you've enabled call reporting, new calls will be counted with the default conversion action Calls from ads."
3. 3

   Raise the minimum call length

   A call counts once it passes a minimum you set, in seconds, which Google frames as a way to "filter out shorter calls that probably don't include sales or other valuable actions for your business." The default is short, about a minute, and generous for most trades: a 60-second call can be a wrong number who stayed polite. Raise it to 90 or 120 seconds so the Conversions column means a conversation.
4. 4

   Create the website call action separately if your number is on the site

   Select + Create conversion action, then Conversions from phone calls, then the Phone call lead category, then the website route and the sub-option matching what you want to measure. Google offers to install the phone snippet for you, email it to your developer, or hand it to Google Tag Manager.
5. 5

   Confirm the snippet landed on every page with your number

   Only one number per page can be tracked with the default JavaScript tag, and the snippet belongs before the config command in the Google tag. If a developer installed it, ask them to confirm the page count rather than the installation.

Two things owners ask about forwarding numbers. They are free: Google does not charge for the numbers or for someone manually dialing one, and you pay for the ad interaction as always. The other is cosmetic and real. Callers see a Google number instead of yours, which some businesses dislike on principle. Caller ID still works, the call routes straight to your line, and call reporting captures duration, start time and whether the call connected.

Google Analytics is not required for any of this. The Google Ads tag tracks conversions on its own. Link the two because Analytics tells you what happened on the site around the conversion, not because tracking depends on it.

One vocabulary correction, because it dates any article that gets it wrong. In 2024 Google renamed Analytics conversions to key events and split the two words apart: "a key event is an event that measures an action that's particularly important to the success of your business", the Analytics-side object, and "a conversion is created from a Google Analytics event and provides a consistent way of measuring important actions in both Google Analytics and Google Ads", the Google Ads-side object. In Analytics you mark an event as a key event. In Google Ads you have conversions.

Creating Google Ads conversions from GA4 key events takes three things: the two accounts linked, auto-tagging enabled in Google Ads, and administrator or editor access to the GA4 property. From the Analytics side the path runs Advertising, then Conversion management under Tools, then New conversion. Pick the Google Ads account, select the events you want, choose a category, review, save. Our GA4 collection article covers making those events correct in the first place, which matters more than the import.

Google publishes no sentence telling you to prefer one source over the other, but its default answers the question. Analytics-based actions arrive as secondary so they will not drive bidding, and native Google Ads actions feed the Conversions column and Smart Bidding. Keep the Analytics equivalents secondary for observation. The two products also attribute conversions differently, and an owner comparing two dashboards that disagree ends up trusting neither. Our GA4 foundations article works through the same discipline from the analytics side.

The last step of setup is not saving. It is watching the account admit that something arrived. Open your own site, submit the contact form the way a customer would, land on the thank-you page, then read the Tracking status column. Everything before this was configuration. This part is evidence.

Unverified is where a half-finished setup rests forever. Google defines it as meaning the tag associated with the action has not yet fired. Not that it fired and failed. That it has never fired. On a new action on a low-traffic site that is normal for a while, and Google says the status can update within 10 minutes on accounts receiving many conversions an hour. Still Unverified after 24 hours is a setup problem rather than a patience problem.

1. 1

   From Goals and Summary, select View all conversion actions

   This opens the full table with the Tracking status column.
2. 2

   Hover over the status and select Troubleshoot

   The link appears for actions showing Unverified, Tag inactive or Needs attention.
3. 3

   Select Continue to open Tag Assistant

   It launches in a new window from inside Google Ads. No separate site to visit, no browser extension.
4. 4

   Enter the page URL and select Connect

   Use the page where the conversion starts, not the thank-you page.
5. 5

   Perform the conversion on your own site

   Submit the form and reach the thank-you page. Tag Assistant watches the tag fire in real time, which is the difference between believing it works and knowing.
6. 6

   Select Finish, then Close Tag Assistant

   Google puts the account update at roughly 30 minutes after the debug session.

Two gotchas make working setups look broken. If you test website call tracking more than once, delete the gwcc cookie between test calls, and give a new call conversion action up to an hour before it goes live. Testers dial once, see it work, dial again, see nothing, and conclude it failed.

One last habit before Lesson 3. Read the Conversions column, not All conv. Conversions holds your primary actions and is what bidding optimizes toward. All conversions adds secondary actions and view-through conversions, so it is always bigger and always more flattering. Useful for observation, not the score.

Lesson 3 is where you get to spend. Now that the account can tell a lead from a click, a campaign has something to answer to: keywords chosen rather than suggested, match types you understand, negative keywords that keep you out of auctions you cannot win, a budget sized against your own cost per lead, and ads written for the searches you picked. Each decision is easier once the measurement exists, which is why it came second instead of fourth. If you would rather have this run for you, that is what our paid advertising work does, and the tracking always goes in before the budget.