Conversion tracking, when enabled in Merchant Center, allows you to monitor your sales using specific conversion metrics related to purchases. Conversion tracking helps you to identify which products and keywords are most successful for your business.
This article explains how conversion tracking works and provides instructions on how to set it up in Merchant Center.
In this article
- Benefits of conversion tracking
- How conversion tracking works
- Set up conversion tracking
- Remove conversion tracking
- Frequently asked questions
Benefits of conversion tracking
- Performance measurement: conversion tracking enables you to measure the success of your product sales. When used with a web analytics tool, conversion tracking allows you to track how effectively your products are showing for free on Google. Conversion tracking helps you to get performance reports with insights about your free product listings – like whether they've led to purchases and how they compare to your overall Google traffic.
- Continuous improvement: Conversion tracking provides a feedback loop for ongoing optimisation of your products. You can continually refine and enhance your product offerings and website based on product traffic and data-driven insights, leading to better results over time.
- Improved metrics: Conversion tracking plays an important role in understanding and improving metrics such as clicks, impressions and click-through-rate (CTR) to improve your online advertising and marketing.
How conversion tracking works
After a customer clicks on your free product listings, conversion tracking adds a bit of additional information – a parameter called a result ID – to the URLs that customers click through.
Example
If someone clicks on your free listings from www.example.com, the final URL will look like this: www.example.com/?srsltid=123xyz.
The result ID is created at the time of an impression. If a customer clicks the same free listings again, the same result ID will be used.
Set up conversion tracking
The three steps involved in setting up conversion tracking include:
- Enabling auto-tagging
- Linking a conversion source with two options:
- Link to Google Analytics property – This option requires linking an existing Google Analytics account.
- Apply tags on your website – This option requires you to change your website's code.
- Setting up a tag on your website
Conversion tracking can be enabled at the Merchant Center account level by an admin. It won't be enabled by default. To set up conversion tracking, follow the steps below.
In your Merchant Center account, click the settings and tools icon
.
Click Conversion settings.
Toggle on Auto-tagging. A banner will appear confirming that the auto-tagging feature is turned on. Now you can start adding conversion sources. Learn more About conversion annotations.
- You can turn on numeric annotations, which allows Google to use your numeric conversion data to showcase your shop's popularity to shoppers. This includes features that may display specific conversion numbers. However, this is completely optional.
Click Add conversion source. You can either select to go through Google Analytics or through applying tags to your website.
In 'Select how to add a conversion source', you can select either 'Link Google Analytics' or 'Link your website'.
If you have a Google Analytics 4 account, you can select 'Link Google Analytics' and you can link your accounts to send conversion details on purchases from Google Analytics to Merchant Center.
If you do not have a Google Analytics 4 account, you can use a Google tag that sends purchase details directly from your website to Merchant Center. You need to select 'Link your website', then click Next.
On the 'Create a destination' page, click Receive tracking.
- Under 'Configure conversion tracking data', add 'Tracking name'.
- Select 'Attribution model'.
- Select a 'conversion window' of 7, 30 or 40 days. 40 days is the recommended conversion window.
- Click Next.
Click Send tracking.
- Under 'Send tracking data via tags on your website', click Set up.
- In the 'Google tag' section, select
- Click Set up. Wait for the Google Tag Manager UI to render.
- You should see a Google tag connected to the Merchant Center destination under the 'Your Google tag' section.
- Click Installation instructions.
- Follow steps based on if a website builder was used or if a manual installation can be done.
- Close the Google Tag Manager UI and click Next.
- If another tag should be used after clicking 'Set up':
- Click Admin.
- Click Manage Google tag.
- Click Combine with another tag.
- Click Choose a Google tag to combine.
- Select a tag. Follow the steps and click Save.
- Close the Google Tag Manager UI and click Next.
- If another destination should be mapped to this tag after clicking 'Set up':
- Click Admin.
- Click Manage Google tag.
- Click + Destination.
- Click Choose a destination.
- Select the destination. Follow the steps and click Save.
- Close the Google Tag Manager UI and click Next.
- In the 'Google tag' section, select
Click Define conversion.
- In 'Choose where to measure conversions', add the conversion URL (this URL denotes a conversion).
- Click Done.
After you've configured the connection with the conversion source, you'll need to refresh the page to view the conversion source added to the table in Merchant Center.
After you're all set up, you'll start viewing conversion metrics in your Performance dashboard.
As a reminder, you must ensure that you're providing users with clear and comprehensive information about the data that you collect on your apps and that you're getting consent for that collection where legally required.
Remove conversion tracking
To remove conversion tracking, follow these steps:
In your Merchant Center account, click the settings and tools icon
.
Click Conversion settings.
In the table's 'Actions' column, select Remove access for the 'Conversion source' that you want to remove.
In the pop-up window, click Remove access.
Frequently asked questions
How do I view traffic from free listings in Google Analytics?
For Google Analytics 4 properties, the traffic source is 'Shopping free listings'. For Universal Analytics (the previous version of Google Analytics) properties, free listings traffic is reported with all other free listings traffic sources from Google (with 'Google' as the traffic source and 'free listings' as the medium).
Learn more about traffic sources in Google Analytics.