Google Ads Manager – Page 2 – The Web Authority

April 20, 2023April 20, 2023

Welcome to the New World of Google Ads Tracking – Trust Me, You Won’t Like It

Google is always evolving, and unfortunately we have to evolve along with them. Here’s the big issue – with the implementation of G4, loss of third party cookie tracking, sunsetting of Google UA Analytics around July 1, we are just now starting to really see the new world of conversion tracking for Google Ads – and it is not pretty.

The Issue is Third Party Cookies

The Chrome browser will be retiring third party cookies use next year. More states in the US have been enacting privacy regulations to allow users visiting your website to choose which cookies to allow; which is in effect getting rid of your ability to fully track users to your website. You will now only be able to track the people who allow your first party cookies.

On one site when we allowed users to opt out of marketing and conversion tracking, the recorded activity dropped nearly 80%. The ability of users being able to choose what you, as a website owner, can track is starting to impact Google Ads conversion reporting as well.

Sunsetting of UA Analytics

G4, the new version of Google Analytics, is not easy or intuitive to use. It is hard to find clear revenue and ad spend figures in G4 that have been derived from Google Ads activity. Add to that, the fact that Google puts Google Ads Performance Max and shopping program results in a new channel category called “cross network” and this channel is not marked as results coming from Google Ads clearly.

Cross Network Tracking

Plus, Google and Google Ads have been slow to enable conversion tracking for cross network use. This important metric is still being enabled slowly account by account in Google Ads. We have only one client who has received notice so far, that this feature has been turned on for their account. Once enabled, cross network conversions will provide a modicum of additional information for conversion reporting and raise the current dismal numbers slightly.

The new world of conversion tracking and reporting in Google Ads is a murky one at this point.

Visitors Are Opting Out Not In

Given an opportunity to opt out of tracking and conversion cookies on a website, visitors are opting out and not in. In G4 Analytics, you must manually add cross network activity to the paid search activity to arrive at a somewhat accurate figure for activity be that traffic or revenue.

I am sure that Google will be addressing these issues in the future, but for now G4 is not easy to use, conversion set up difficult, and validity of the data murky.

A Drop in Reported Conversions and Revenue

We are seeing significantly lower conversion and revenue numbers flowing into Google Ads. As a Google Partner and experienced account manager, it is very important to explain to our client/advertisers that this does not mean that Google Ads is not working for them, but rather that all data can simply not be captured and reported as before.

What to Do?

We feel that having our clients watch overall sales, contact form submissions, and review activity against prior years and periods, in addition to information that we can glean from overall site traffic will be important to review in conjunction with Google Ads activity.

Clients should be apprised, in advance, that Google Ads conversions may drop during this transition period and that these lower reported conversion and revenue numbers will most likely be the new reality.

As account managers, we will now have to look at the total sales/leads, if clients will share the data with us, and review actions back on the website, if we have access to their G4 accounts, to get a fuller picture of Google Ads marketing efforts to continue to communicate the value of Google Ads as an investment in our clients’ business growth.

Welcome to the Future

Welcome to the new world of conversion tracking and reporting for Google Ads! However, we are up to the challenge to help you get the most activity possible on Google Ads, even in light of some of these adversities. With more than 15 years of experience on the platform, McCord Web Services is a Google Partner and expert in Google Ads account management.

For more information about our services, we invite you to visit our Google Ads services section and our white label agency services section.

About the Author, Nancy McCord

Nancy McCord is the CEO and Founder of McCord Web Services LLC. She started the firm in 2001 and has been a professional Google Ads account manager for more than 15 years. She is considered to be an expert in Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Search Engine Optimization.

January 18, 2023

January Google Ads Conversions Dip

This month, we are seeing a trend across nearly all managed Google Ads accounts and wanted to share the issue with you and how we are working to improve account performance.

In January 2023, we are seeing a dip in conversion activity in Google Ads across a broad sector of verticals. B2B and B2C are impacted as well as ecommerce accounts.

We are seeing good upward movement in clicks and impressions but conversions are lagging compared to the prior month and last 30 day figures by 13% to as much as over 50%.

With a full review of all account metrics, we are not looking carefully at the use of broad match keywords in client accounts and are either moving out of broad match entirely and into phrase match and/or adding to our negative keyword list.

Of concern to us as experienced Google Ads account managers is the continued push by Google and Google Reps to fully embrace a broad match only keyword strategy. But, we find that broad match does not always meet our clients’ needs.

It is important to monitor closely the search queries that are triggering ads. Google has continued to erode the line between broad match and phrase match much to our concern. This change in client account activity may be an impact of Google continuing to blur the line between phrase match and broad match keywords.

We’ll keep you posted as we evaluate further and continue to react to the changing environment driven by the auction in Google Ads.

April 6, 2022April 5, 2022

Privacy Changes Drive Google to Sunset Universal Analytics in Favor of G4

July 1, 2023 is the sunset date for UA or Universal Analytics.

Google has announced that it will sunset the popular web traffic analytics tool called Universal Analytics in favor of G4 Analytics on July 1, 2023.

Why is Google making this change?

With the changing needs for privacy, Google has decided that it is time for everyone to get onboard and embrace G4 Analytics. Read about the differences between the two.

G4 has been out for two years, but many, myself included, consider the dashboard difficult to set up and use. This has slowed webmasters and marketing managers from embracing the new cookieless technology of G4.

Additionally, Google announced that the data from Universal Analytics (UA) will not flow into G4. So, webmasters should plan on adding code now for G4 to start gathering data before the UA sunset date. Some webmasters and site owners may want to do a download of UA data before the sunset of the application.

It’s all about the third party cookies

All of these changes are about the use of third party cookies for tracking. Google Ads uses audiences and cookies from UA when merged with Google Ads to create tracking for advanced audiences. Specifically the explanation below puts this issue in easy to understand terms.

“…the change reflects an evolution on how analytics is associated with websites and the changing role analytics plays in privacy. Universal Analytics represented the pinnacles of page-loaded measurement, introducing cross platform tracking and more flexible code options for producing custom dimensions and metrics. However, it still relied on cookies, the text files in browsers, to transmit data behind the dimensions and metrics. ” Read more.

By moving beyond cookies with G4, Google is building for the future, but may also be self-serving to benefit remarketing and conversion technology alternatives to protect Google Ads. The loss of third party cookies is a huge issue for Google Ads conversion tracking and for the serving of remarketing ads for advertisers.

For now, Google and McCord Web Services is recommending running UA Analytics and G4 on the same website. Allowing the two to run will build a number of months worth of data before UA Analytics is sunset.

The problem with G4 is it is more than an update it is a new protocol

If you have logged into a G4 account you most likely are stunned at the lack of any data. G4 runs on custom events, there are really very few built out features at this time which makes it hard for webmasters to embrace G4 as a functional alternative to UA Analytics.

Although the ability to customize events may be a boon for some, for most G4 cannot be considered a plug and play application. We are hopeful that as the sunset date gets closer Google will listen to the feedback about needing to make G4 more user friendly and offer more information on how to set up events that make sense to replace the information lost when compared to UA.

Our recommendation is to start now with G4 code implementation so data can start accruing for at least one year. And to start learning now to create events for the important statistics you like in Universal Analytics in G4.

We encourage you to subscribe to our blog posts to stay informed on what’s coming up for G4 and Google Ads. Just visit our blog home page and look on the right side bar for subscribe by email to get a copy of our blog posts when they are published.

March 21, 2022

What to Know About the Future of Web Cookies

The future of the Worldwide Web is cookie-less. Google has announced that the Chrome browser, which has a market share of 66.6% (as of December 2021) will drop third-party cookies in 2023. Most other browsers already allow you to block third-party cookies, but we expect all browsers to follow suit with total blocks of third-party cookies in 2023 or earlier.

So what? You may say, but for the world of online advertising, this change is and a really big deal. How so? By blocking third-party cookies, conversion and reporting data will be less accurate and may even impact how willing businesses are to spend cash on paid advertising.

Here are just a few ways that third-party cookies are used:

Google Analytics uses third-party cookies to track user behavior and return the website traffic stats that we all love to use. With 55.2% of all websites using Google Analytics this loss of data may impact marketing decisions and lower the accuracy of results reported in Google Analytics.

Google Ads remarketing programs use third-party cookies to serve ads and track activity. The loss of relevant data and the inaccurate recording of conversion activity may lower the realized relevance of Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising programs as businesses struggle to make a case for high ad spend budgets with lower reported results.

Google Ads uses third-party cookies for conversion tracking data in Google Ads. Without strong conversion metrics, some advertisers may search for alternative opportunities to generate website activity and lower their footprint in paid search advertising.

Facebook uses third-party cookies to deliver ads in based on your online activity. With the changes that Apple made in late 2021 to require users to approve cookies set on their device, Facebook advertisers are reporting a drop in conversions and higher conversion costs.

What is Being Done to Help Advertisers with Cookie-Less Reporting Issues?

Google has been very proactive in seeking solutions for third-party cookie retirement, but with minimal industry participation. This past year most mainstream browsers refused to join Google’s initiative called FLoC. This was Google’s program to solve the third-party cookie program, but getting all browsers to work together to create audience groupings. Due to the lack of interest, Google actually abandoned their program and pushed the self-imposed deadline of dropping third-party cookies back one year.

Google has still not announced a clear resolution that is embraced by browsers on how to solve this issue.

For now, we see Google pushing users into the new G4 Analytics by announcing the dropping of UA Universal Analytics later this year. Google stats that G4 will be able to use cookie-less data and then extrapolate based on trends and machine learning to fill in the gaps in activity. Clearly this is why there is such a push to get websites and advertisers to embrace G4 quickly.

Google is also pushing the use of Customer Match lists in Google Ads. As these lists are first-party data, Google is hedging bets that it will be able to record the conversions and activity from these data sets to boost reporting performance.

At issue for us with Customer Match, is the difficulty for some businesses to map data from their CRM into Google’s data fields. But most of all once the list is loaded, Google sometimes has such a woefully low match to mapping these users to users it knows of that customer match lists becomes meaningless.

For example one of our clients sent us a 10,000 member list to load and Google was able to only map 400 members. You need 1,000 members on the list to use the list in search ads which renders the time and exercise to clean up a customer match list a waste of time.

As this is a difficult problem without a clear path to a resolution, this topic is one you will want to watch this year as Google and Facebook seek cookie alternatives.