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Google Ads

Audit Checklist

Instrumentation (GTM)

  • Has a Google Tag (AW-XXXXXXXXX) firing on All Pages or similar
  • Has a single Conversion Linker firing on Initialization - All Pages
  • Has a functioning User-Provided Data event tag and variable for valid conversion actions. The User-Provided Data variable should not use "automatic" detection

Platform Settings

  • Goals: Remove any imported Universal Analytics goals
  • Goals: Review primary conversion goals. A given conversion should not trigger more than a single primary conversion action (otherwise you risk duplication). Auxiliary conversions should be marked as Secondary.
  • Goals > Settings: Both "Enhanced Conversions" settings should be set to Managed by Google Tag Manager
  • Goals > Custom Variables: Does the account utilize any custom variables?

Check your conversion action Count setting!
For conversions with a "lead generation" objective, the correct setting should almost ALWAYS be set to count One (e.g. Unique). "Every" should only be used in situations where repeat conversions for the same "click" are valuable (e-commerce or similar).

1st Party Cookies

All examples below use a placeholder value ([PARAM:X]) for a given "click identifier" (where X would be one of: gclid, wbraid, gbraid). This is done to keep the examples brief and easy to read/reference.

Cookie Name Value Format Expiration
_gcl_ag 2.1.k[PARAM:gbraid]$i[TIME] 90 days
_gcl_aw GCL.[TIME].[PARAM:gclid] 90 days
_gcl_gb GCL.[TS].[PARAM:wbraid] 90 days

The "real" values of the [PARAM:X] placeholders can be as long as 255 characters. Make sure that whatever field/column (e.g. CRM or database) can store a value of this length.

These values should be captured along side lead-data to enable offline conversion imports (OCI).

Enhanced Conversions

See official documentation here.

Email Addresses

  1. Lowercase the entire value & remove all whitespace
  2. Remove all . values before the @ ONLY for gmail.com and googlemail.com email addresses.
  3. Remove any values after and including the + before the @ symbol.

Examples

[email protected] -> [email protected]
[email protected] -> [email protected]

Phone Numbers

  1. Remove any non-numeric (e.g 0-9) characters.
  2. Value must follow E164 formatting standard.

Examples

(412) 555-1234 -> +14125551234
+1 412.555.1234 -> +14125551234

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