Conversion tracking, when enabled in Merchant Center, allows you to monitor your sales using specific conversion metrics related to purchases. Conversion tracking helps you 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 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 optimization of your products. You can continually refine and enhance your product offerings, marketing campaigns, 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 customers click through.
Example
If someone clicks on your free listings from www.example.com, the final URL will look like 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 3 steps involved in setting up conversion tracking include:
- Enabling auto-tagging
- Linking a conversion source
- 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.
Click Turn on auto-tagging. A banner will appear confirming that the auto-tagging feature is turned on.
Click Add conversions source. You can either select to go through Google Analytics or through applying tags to your website.
- If you have a Google Analytics 4 account, you can link your accounts to send conversion details on purchases from Google Analytics to Merchant Center.
- Otherwise, you can use a Google tag that sends purchase details directly from your website to Merchant Center.
- 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 you're providing users with clear and comprehensive information about the data you collect on your apps, and 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 Delete for the "Conversion source" you want to remove.
In the pop-up window, click Delete.
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.