Google AdWords Conversion Tracking In a Less-Than-Ideal World

Tony Fazzini - August 18, 2014

One of the hardest parts of tracking conversions in Google AdWords is not having a unique page to use as a “conversion point.” When you don’t have a unique page, it can be difficult to determine where to place the conversion pixel. And without the conversion pixel, you’ll never know if users are taking the desired action when they come to your landing page or website.

This scenario is all-too-common if your site has limited functionality, or if your conversion occurs on a different domain. While this is never ideal, there is still a way track conversions from these pages within Google AdWords – you just have to be a little crafty.

Since we can’t track the conversion page, the next best solution is to track the action a user would take to navigate to the conversion page; in most cases, this is a button click.  While this is less-than-perfect, it can allow you to see how many users moved from your landing page or website onto that additional action where you might otherwise lose visibility.

Tracking Actions by Adding Conversion Code to Button Clicks

By placing the conversion code into an iFrame on a button click, you would then be able to “fire” the code every time someone selects that action.

For example:

On all pages where you want to track this link, use the following code:

Then, add the following “On Click” event to each button you’d like to track:

onclick=”setTimeout(setIframe,2000);”

Right after each link, insert:

<div id=”psm” style=”display:none;”></div>

Lastly, create an HTML file named “AdWords Conversion Tracking.html” (or whatever name you used from the first step) and paste the conversion coding from AdWords into this file. You can also add tracking code using Google Tag Manager.

It’s a good idea to name your HTML file something very easily identifiable so you will remember down the road what that code is doing (don’t forget to change this in step 1 as well so that you are requesting the correct document).

Once completed, run a few test conversions and make sure you are able to see them come through within the Google AdWords interface and ensure that the data looks correct.  If you see the conversions come through, you’re all set and are now tracking clicks as conversions!