Use Google Analytics to track inquiries from AdWords users based on the URL of the contact request

Question

My clients site cannot be modified to track goals, the platform they use will not allow it and the developer has no interest in coding anything in to help.

I'm coming to the site late in the game but the AdWords and Analytics have been linked for some time, i just need to get a report on which AdWords campaigns are producing leads. I can determine which are doing this by looking at the URLs, if it contains ?inquire the user sent a contact request.

How can I create a report that will show me where this specific set of users came from? What AdWords campaign, or direct / organic search etc.

Answer 1

Google Tag Manager + Conversion Linker should do the trick here. There's nothing too crazy about the data you're looking to collect.

From Google:

When people click on your ads, the URL of the conversion page on your website typically includes information about the click. When a site visitor takes an action that you’ve tagged as a conversion (e.g. when a Google Ads conversion tag is fired), the click information is used to associate that conversion with the click that brought the visitors to your site.

The conversion linker tag automatically detects the ad click information in your conversion page URLs, and stores this information in first-party cookies on your domain for web pages, and passes the data in URLs for AMP pages. If you use a conversion linker tag with Google Marketing Platform products, the conversion linker tag may also store unique identifiers in those cookies.

So you'll want to set up 3 things:

• A tag to fire on /?inquire hits and

• A goal in GA when your GA conversion tag is fired,

• Conversion Linker tag - to automatically detect the ad click information in your conversion page URLs. The tag will stores the information in a first-party cookie on your domain for web pages.

There should be plenty of guides on YouTube if you need help.

Answer 2

Why do you think the site needs to be coded to track goals in Google Analytics? If you have destinations urls that indicate what page a conversion has taken place on, you set up the goals in Google Analytics, not on the site, or in the code.

Also, if adwords is linked to Google Analytics, and you say it has, then you have Adwords reports inside Google Analytics, under Acquisition> Google Ads.

Answer 3

You are looking for the "goals" feature in Google Analytics. You can set up a "destination goal" which is based on a visited URL. Here is a link to the Google Analytics help about goals.

To make this work you need to visit the GA Admin section and go to "Goals". Then select "New Goal". From the template select the "Contact Us" template. Name it "Inquiry" and set it to be "destination" type. For the destination, set it to "Regular Expression" and use .*\?inquire.*. Save the goal.

After some data comes in you can use the "Conversions", "Goals" report to see the information you need.