Conversions provide insights into your campaign performance. You choose what you identify as valuable, like a purchase, sign-up, or phone call, and Google Ads will then help you get the most out of your campaigns. For setup instructions, review Set up your conversions.
On this page
Why use conversion measurement
- Learn 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 Maximize Conversions, target CPA, and target ROAS) that automatically optimize your campaigns according to your business goals.
- Find out 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 conversions work
1. Select the surfaces for your conversion tracking
First, tell us about your business and where your conversions happen.
- Website conversions: Website conversion measurement analyzes specific actions that users take on your website after interacting with your Google Ads. Learn more about setting up web conversions.
- Categories: Purchases, sign-ups, and other actions that customers complete on your website. Learn more about how Google Ads tracks website conversions.
- App conversions: For businesses with mobile apps, in-app conversions are essential to measure the true impact of Google Ads. Learn more about setting up app conversions
- Categories: App installs and in-app actions. Installs of your Android or iOS mobile apps, and purchases or other activity within those apps. Learn more About mobile app conversion tracking.
- If you have both a website and a mobile app, you can set up app conversion tracking using Web to App Connect to provide a seamless web-to-app experience for your customers.
- Phone call conversions: By connecting call data to your campaigns, you can identify which ads are driving valuable phone leads. Learn more about setting up phone call conversions
- Categories: Calls directly from your ads, calls to a phone number on your website, and clicks on a phone number on your mobile website. Learn more about phone call conversion tracking.
- Offline conversions: You can review your offline conversions to help determine how your ads are impacting your sales in physical stores. Learn more about setting up offline conversions
- Categories: Offline conversion imports works a little differently depending on whether you’re tracking conversions that start with an ad click or call from your ad. Learn more About offline conversion imports.
2. Select a data source
After making your selections, add a data source for the conversion locations you’ve selected. We’ll save your data source preferences for the next time you come back to this conversion set up workflow.
3. Create conversion actions
When you move to the next step, you’ll be able to create conversion actions from any of the data sources you’ve added.
A conversion action is a specific customer activity that is valuable to your business. This action will be measured and the measurements can be used to refine your campaign so that you can best meet your advertising objectives.
4. Finish setup
After you’ve created your conversions, you can review the next steps to ensure your conversions can be measured correctly. For setup instructions, review Set up your conversions
The conversion measurement 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 Google 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 measurement don’t require a tag. For example, to track phone calls from call assets 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.
After you’ve set up conversion measurement, you can view 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 conversion and event tracking
Google has strict security standards. Google Ads only collects data on sites and apps where you have configured tracking.
Ensure that you provide users with clear and comprehensive information about the data you collect on your sites, apps, and other properties. Make sure that you also get consent where required by law or any applicable Google policies governing user consent, including Google’s EU User Consent Policy.
Note: If you haven't 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 Google tag to disable the collection of personalized advertising data for specific users.