Why You Need Google Ads Conversion Tracking in Gravity Forms

If you’re running ads on Google, you know how important it is to collect accurate information from your visitors. We make the best business decisions when we know which ads are (and aren’t) working.

Setting up conversion tracking in Google Ads is critical to the ongoing success of your ad campaigns, but wouldn’t it be great if your forms showed when the visitor came from Google Ads right in the entry itself? That’s exactly what we thought, so we created the Google Ads Tracker for Gravity Forms plugin!

Update: Our new Referral Tracking for Gravity Forms plugin not only tracks leads from Google Ads, but also Google Organic, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more!

The Problem

Gravity Forms is a powerful form-building plugin for WordPress that allows users to easily create and customize forms for their websites.

You can build all different types of forms geared toward different needs, like contact information, product sales, email newsletter signups, and a lot more. With its drag-and-drop interface and customizable fields, you can make forms for just about anything!

Gravity Forms has an add-on that allows you to track form submission events in Google Analytics, which can then be marked as conversions and imported into Google Ads, but it doesn’t add any data to the form submission itself. That means you won’t be 100% sure that the form you’re looking at came from a Google Ads click unless you’re only getting one or two submissions a day.

Our plugin solves that problem by complimenting the existing Gravity Forms Google Analytics Add-on. It adds two new fields to your form entries, telling you if the form came from Google Ads and including the GCLID if it did.

Why is Conversion Tracking Important?

If you’re running a Google Ads campaign to promote your business or website, you need to track conversions to determine the effectiveness of your advertising efforts.

Properly tracking conversions in Gravity Forms gives you a view into how users are interacting with your website and is critical for optimizing your campaigns.

It helps business owners determine exactly which forms users interact with so they can avoid guesswork, save time and money, and replicate their most successful marketing efforts. By looking at form conversions, you can also find the number of leads generated from each campaign.

Finally, importing in the conversion data into Google Ads will yield improved campaign performance over time.

Conversion tracking is a must if you want to better understand your website’s performance or optimize your PPC ad campaigns!

Getting The Whole Picture

Suppose you run a business that sells and installs solar panels. Your WordPress website uses Gravity Forms to collect contact information, which looks something like this in the backend:

It is nothing super detailed, but you can kind of see which forms are converting more successfully and which ones are getting more views. However, “Conversion” here doesn’t mean you converted a click from your ads – it’s just entries divided by views. That number can give you a general idea of how often forms are submitted, but it won’t tell you where those visitors came from.

Now, let’s say to promote your business, you decide to run ad campaigns on Google targeting two different types of products you sell – one that focuses on solar hot water and another that focuses on solar panel installation.

If you’re using Google Analytics to measure your traffic and form completion, you’ll likely end up with data like this.

Judging by this table, your solar hot water campaign has over twice as many conversions as your solar panel campaign. The next logical step would be to devote more funds to the better-performing campaign.

But wait, you’d be making a mistake!

You don’t really have all the data yet.

When you use Google Ads conversion tracking in Gravity Forms, your campaign reporting might actually look more like this.

Now that we have the full picture, the solar panel installation campaign was actually far more successful than the hot water campaign despite having fewer initial leads.

Not only did you get a higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), but your solar panel campaign also gained more paying customers and had a higher value per customer ($10,322 vs. $6,000).

The Solution (And How To Take Your Google Ads Campaigns to The Next Level!)

So far, we’ve learned a few things:

1.  Tracking the Google Ads conversions you receive from Gravity Forms submissions can make a big difference in how you market your products or services.
2. By default, no conversion tracking data is stored in Gravity Forms entries or sent to Google Ads.
3. You can install the Gravity Forms Google Analytics add-on, but that just sends entry data to Analytics. You still have to set that up as a conversion and then import it into Google Ads (you should do this if you haven’t!)
4. Even after setting up the conversion in Google Analytics and Google Ads, you still won’t have the data in the Gravity Forms entry itself, so you can’t be 100% sure it came from Google Ads.

We found ourselves spending a lot of time trying to figure out exactly which form submissions came from Google Ads versus other sources. Our Google Ads Tracker for Gravity Forms plugin solves this problem by adding fields to your new and existing forms. Once setup, you’ll know if those new form submissions you’re getting are coming from Google Ads or not. We include the GCLID, which is a unique identifier for each visitor, so you can export that data and import it back into Google Ads or other tools for advanced optimization (such as offline conversion tracking). Here’s a quick video showing you just how easy our plugin is to set up and use.

When you try to make marketing decisions without having all of the information, you’re really only working with half the data you need.

Google Ads conversion tracking in Gravity Forms gives you info about your customer’s entire journey. While it’s useful to know form completion rates, what really matters is conversions – how your website users went from the campaign’s landing page to the form submission and finally, becoming a customer.