How can you track Google referrals after a view through conversion? With custom events. Here’s how you can create one in Google Tag Manager…
Create the Custom Event
1. Create the tag. Use custom HTML and add the event code.
2. Create your trigger. This will be a Page View trigger type that fires on “some page views.” Trigger it when the referrer contains “google.”
3. Publish your new tag and trigger.
You don’t technically need to use Google Tag Manager to do this, but it’s what I do. You could also create a custom conversion based on the referrer.
If you create a custom event, don’t forget that you’ll need to verify it in Events Manager before using it.
View the Data
Then add this new event as a column in Ads Manager.
To isolate the conversions that happened via view-through, compare attribution settings and select 1-day view.
If you want, you can also limit the reporting to First Conversion.
When you’re done, you will see how many people were served your ad and didn’t click, but they Googled your business within a day and were referred to your website.
This is valuable, but you could take it a step further. How many of these Google referrals ended up converting? We’ll talk about that in a separate video.
A post by Kevin Kovach inspired me to record a series of three videos about view through conversions and Google referrals (this is the second). You can read Kevin’s post here.
