rosenberger.marketing

Short Summary:

Conversion tracking for Google Ads is becoming increasingly important, as Google is giving less and less control and letting the algorithm optimize based on previous conversions.

The most important tracking (in this order)

• Revenue and Transaction ID

• Dynamic Remarketing

• Passing shopping cart information

• Enhanced Conversions

• New vs. returning customers

• Advanced Consent Mode

• Server Side Tagging

• Optimization based on profit instead of revenue

Fundamentals for Online Shops

You should definitely measure this information:

• Measuring transactions (at all)

• Measuring revenue (ideally without VAT and shipping costs)

• Secondary conversions like add_to_cart and begin_checkout (only optimize for these if there are too few transactions)

• Transaction ID

• As a backup: GA4 import of transactions and transactions based on the page view of the thank you page

Dynamic Remarketing

With dynamic remarketing, you can bring existing visitors back to the shop (cost-effectively). These campaigns are possible:

• Display Remarketing campaign

• Demand Gen Remarketing campaign

• YouTube Remarketing campaign

• RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) campaign

pMAX campaigns should not be used for remarketing.

For remarketing to work, you need these tags in GTM. Remarketing audiences can then be created based on this.

Remarketing Base Tag

• Remarketing for “category page viewed”

• Remarketing for “product viewed”

• Remarketing for “product added to cart”

• Remarketing for “checkout started”

• Remarketing for “transaction completed” (to remove buyers from remarketing lists)

Particularly important: The parameter “Event Items” must contain the viewed/added to cart/purchased products in the correct format. In particular, the product ID must exactly match the one in the Merchant Center.

Server Side Tagging

Advantages:

• Less influence from ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) in Safari and Firefox

• Fewer data blocked by ad blockers

• More influence over what information is sent to providers

How it works:

In traditional client-side tracking, data is transmitted from the tag manager directly to the individual providers/tools. With server-side tagging, an additional tag manager is interposed. Instead of sending data directly from the (client-side) Tag Manager to e.g. Google or Facebook, the data is sent to the server-side Tag Manager.

• In the server-side Tag Manager, the data is adjusted and then forwarded to e.g. Google or Facebook.