Google Ads conversion tracking | Voters

Google Ads conversion tracking

Liran Cohen

Ability to integration with Google's Ad tracking to track conversions.

April 25, 2020

Sam Pepin

We successfully implemented Google Ads conversion tracking for a Givebutter embedded donation flow on tumimurim.org.

Important distinction: this tracks “donation checkout started,” not “donation completed.”

Because the Givebutter widget runs as an embedded third-party donation flow, Google Ads could not reliably detect it as a normal website form or completed purchase. Google Ads’ automatic options were only basic page/form detection, which did not fit the Givebutter widget setup.

Workaround implemented:

We installed Google Tag Manager globally on the site:

GTM-KLCMZF64

In Lovable/the website code, we added a universal dataLayer event that fires when any Givebutter donation flow starts:

homepage embedded Givebutter form
sticky/floating Givebutter widget
Donate/Give/Support buttons across the site

Event used:

givebutter_checkout_started

The event does not fire on page load and only fires once per session to avoid duplicate conversion spam.

In GTM, we created:

Conversion Linker tag firing on All Pages
Custom Event trigger listening for givebutter_checkout_started
Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag firing from that trigger

In Google Ads, we created a conversion action:

Category: Begin checkout

Name: Givebutter Checkout Started

Value: USD $1

Count: One

Status: Primary/Active

Campaigns: 1 of 1

We tested in GTM Preview/Tag Assistant. The event fired once, the Google Ads conversion tag fired once, and the Conversion Linker fired correctly.

This proves Givebutter embedded widget starts can be tracked in Google Ads through:

Website action → dataLayer event → GTM custom event trigger → Google Ads conversion tag.

Limitation:

This is not a true donation/purchase conversion. It only tells Google Ads that someone began the donation checkout flow.

For a true completed donation conversion, Givebutter would need to expose one of the following:

post-donation redirect to a thank-you URL
confirmed donation-success JavaScript event
iframe postMessage event after successful payment
callback
webhook/server-side confirmation
transaction data such as transaction_id, amount, and currency

Ideal future event:

givebutter_donation_completed

with transaction_id, value, currency, campaign_id, and widget_id.

Then Google Ads could track it as Purchase instead of Begin checkout.

Sam Pepin

Where are we with this?

It's been 6 years since the comment and it's not yet available?

Harry Luk

similarly, if we run Google Ads to our site, we need to be able to see the conversion events fired into GA4: https://community.givebutter.com/integration-requests/p/google-analytics-support-on-embedded-iframe

THanks

Jesse Saldana

updated the status to

open

Tori Meglio

updated the status to

under review

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