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
- Frequently asked questions
Benefits of conversion tracking
- Performance measurement: Conversion tracking enables you to measure the success of your product sales. You can track conversions from your free listings and free local product listings on your website on all browsers (separately from other conversion types). You can split out performance in a third-party web analytics tool, such as Google Analytics, between your free listings and free local listings from overall Google organic 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 your free listing and free local listing, conversion tracking adds a bit of additional information—a parameter called a result id—to the URLs people click through.
Example
The result id is created at the time of an impression. If a user clicks the same free listing or free local listing again, the same result id will be used.
Set up conversion tracking
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 tools icon
and then click Conversion settings under "Settings".
- Toggle "Auto-tagging" to 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’re all set up, you’ll start viewing conversion metrics in your performance dashboard. Add at least one conversion source for conversion tracking to work.
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.
Frequently asked questions
How do I view traffic from organic 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 organic traffic sources from Google (with “google” as the traffic source and “organic” as the medium).
Learn more about traffic sources in Google Analytics.