Notes for owners · Digital marketing
How to set up Google Ads conversion tracking
Decide what counts as an enquiry, install one tag, give calls their own rules, and send the orders back from your CRM. Most accounts break at the third step.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
Conversion tracking tells Google which clicks turned into enquiries so the system can buy more of those clicks. Setting it up is four decisions and one piece of code. Decide what counts, put the Google tag on every page, create one conversion action for each thing you count, then send the outcome of those enquiries back from your CRM. Almost every account we are asked to look at has the first three and not the fourth, which is why the campaign optimises towards forms nobody followed up.
First decide what counts, and what only looks like it counts
Write the list before you open the account. For most Indian small businesses it is shorter than the agency's version.
A form submitted on your site. A call placed from the advertisement itself. A call to the number on your website. A WhatsApp message started from a button. A brochure or price list downloaded. An appointment booked in your booking tool.
Now mark which of those you would pay money for. Those are your primary conversions, and they are the only ones the bidding should chase. Everything else goes in as a secondary conversion so you can see it without it steering the budget. A business that marks brochure downloads and WhatsApp clicks as primary will get exactly what it asked for: a great many downloads and a quiet phone.
One more decision hides inside this. For an enquiry, set the conversion action to count one per person, because the same buyer filling your form twice in an evening is one buyer. Count every one only where every action is a separate sale, such as a shop taking orders online.
The three pieces of plumbing
The Google tag on every page. Every page, including the thank-you page and any booking screen. If the tag is missing where the action completes, nothing will ever record.
A conversion action for each thing on your list. Give each one a name a person can read six months later. "Enquiry form, main site" beats "Conversion 3".
A trigger that only fires when the thing actually happened. The easy version is a thank-you page with its own address that a visitor can reach only after submitting. Keep that page out of the search index, and check it does not fire again when somebody refreshes it or lands on it from a bookmark.
Calls are where Indian accounts leak
A large share of enquiries in this country arrive as a phone call, and the call is the part that is set up last or not at all.
There are two kinds, and they are configured separately. A call placed from the advertisement is counted by Google itself, and you choose the minimum length before it counts. Set that length above the time it takes to say a wrong number has been dialled. A call to the number on your website needs a forwarding number. Google swaps it in for visitors who arrived from an advertisement, so that the call can be timed.
Two cautions from practice. Keep the forwarding number to the advertisement path only, so your real number stays consistent on your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. And tell whoever answers the phone that some numbers on screen will look unfamiliar. A receptionist who thinks a call is a sales pitch from an unknown number can undo the whole setup in a week.
The step almost nobody does: send the orders back
A form is not an order. Until Google knows which enquiries were real, it will keep buying whatever produces forms, and the cheapest forms are the worst ones.
The route is not complicated. A hidden field on your form captures the click identifier that Google adds to the address when somebody arrives from an advertisement. That identifier is saved with the enquiry in your CRM. When the sales team marks that enquiry as qualified, quoted or ordered, the status goes back into Google Ads as an offline conversion. Your CRM's own connection can send it, or somebody uploads a file.
The moment this is running, bidding changes its behaviour. Campaigns that were producing forty cheap enquiries and two orders lose money to the ones producing twelve expensive enquiries and five. Check one detail before you start: how long your sale takes from enquiry to order, against the window Google allows for uploading. A business with a four-month decision has to upload an intermediate stage, such as a site visit or a quotation sent, rather than the final order.
Test it the way a customer would
| Check | How |
|---|---|
| The form records | Fill it from your own phone on mobile data, then look for the conversion in the account the next day |
| It fires once | Refresh the thank-you page and confirm a second conversion does not appear |
| The enquiry arrives | Confirm the same test enquiry reached the inbox, the phone and the CRM, and note how long it took |
| Calls record | Ring the advertisement number from a number nobody in the office knows, and speak past the minimum length |
| The identifier is saved | Open the test enquiry in the CRM and look for the click identifier in the hidden field |
| Nothing is double counted | Submit the form and then call, and see whether one buyer produced two primary conversions |
Do this before launch, and again after any change to the website. Conversion tracking breaks silently, and the first sign is a month where the reports look fine and the phone does not ring.
What this number will never tell you
It records the last advertisement click before the action. It does not know about the hoarding that started the search, the cousin who recommended you, or the three visits from a phone before the enquiry came from a laptop.
Some of it is estimated rather than counted, because consent settings and browser limits break the chain for a share of visitors. Read the conversion count as a steering wheel for the ad account. Read your CRM for how many enquiries you actually received, and your invoices for how many orders you got. When the two disagree at month end, the CRM wins the argument.
Website analytics and conversion tracking is the service that does this end to end if you would rather not.
What to do next
Open your account and look at the conversion actions column. If there is no primary conversion, the campaign has been guessing. If there are seven, it has been guessing in seven directions at once.
Then send yourself a test enquiry and time the reply. Every GullySales engagement starts by recording a baseline of enquiries by source and how fast they were answered. That baseline cannot be recorded on an account where nobody knows what a conversion meant.