Connecting Google Ads to NinjaCat

1. If not yet complete, follow the instructions in the article, Google Ads to connect your NinjaCat agency to Google Ads

Enable Google Ads Conversion Tracking

1.  Activate the Auto-Tagging features in your Google Ads interface

2. If not yet complete, follow the instructions in the article, How to Add a NinjaTrack Call Tracking Number to purchase at least one call tracking number and begin to track calls

3. Go to the Account Command Center of the desired Account

4. Click on the three-dot ellipses or "bread crumb" menu icon next to the desired tracking number

5. Click on "Edit"

6. Scroll to the 'Notifications' tab

7. Check the box next to "Enable Adwords Conversion Tracking"

8. Type in the name of the conversion type that calls should be tracked under  

📘

If nothing is specified in the box under "Enable AdWords Conversion Tracking", the conversion name will default to "Phone Call".

Will all phone calls send a conversion to Google Ads?

The short answer is no.  The slightly longer answer to this question follows below.

When users click on one of Google's advertisements, a unique identification number for that click is created, called a google click ID (gclid). If the user clicks directly on a phone number in your ad, assuming that you have turned on the feature to track calls with Google, then this click will already show up in your Google conversions.  If the tracking number used in that click-to-call ad is a NinjaTrack phone number, we will record the phone call, however, we are unable to capture gclids in this use case. However, this isn't normally an issue since Google has its own process for tracking these conversions and they usually fall under the "Calls from ads" conversion name within your Google Ads account. However, when the user clicks on the website before placing the phone call, google no longer has any insight into the behavior of that user. This is where NinjaTrack comes into the picture.

Our website dynamic number insertion script recognizes that the website visitor is coming from a Google paid ad, so the script replaces the business phone number on the website with a NinjaTrack number while capturing the gclid from that visitor.  

If the user then places a phone call within 1 hour of that website visit, then our script makes an association between the most recently collected gclid with the phone call and attributes the caller to the last website visitor from that tracking source. Any gclids captured from that visit can then be used to capture details such as campaign name and keyword from the original google search.  

Only phone calls that have a valid gclid associated with them will show up in your Google Ads account as a conversion.  The date of that conversion will show up as the date that the gclid was generated (not the date of the phone call).

Here are several reasons why there may be a phone call in your NinjaTrack account but there is not an associated conversion in Google Ads.

1. The gclid was from a different day as the phone call, so the conversion was recorded on the day of the click, not the phone call.
2. The gclid collected was from a different google ads account other than the one that is connected to that account in NinjaCat. 
3. The gclid collected was from an Invalid Click.
4. No gclid was collected due to the call being placed from an ad call extension
5. No visitor or valid gclid was collected from the script within 1 hour of the phone call

📘

Number 2 above can sometimes happen if multiple advertising campaigns from multiple google accounts are sending traffic to the same website.  A UTM filter can be added to your google ads and the tracking number to limit the times that the script displays this tracking number to only those that come from the correct Google Ads campaign. For an example of a report, you could build in NinjaCat, check out our Google Ads Report Template.