The best way to capture Google Ads data in FormCraft

Learn how to capture Google Ads data in your FormCraft forms so you know which campaigns generate your leads, customers and revenue.

Are you having a hard time figuring out which of your Google Ads campaigns are actually generating leads & customers?

Imagine how good it would be if you could pinpoint the exact campaign, ad and even keyword each of your leads came from. With this knowledge, you'd know exactly how each is performing and be able to adjust your budget accordingly.

In this post, we'll show you how you can use a tool called Attributer to collect Google Ads data in your FormCraft forms, allowing you to identify the campaigns and ads that generate leads and customers.

Why it's important to track customers and revenue from Google Ads

For the purposes of this article, let's say that you run a business that sells and installs pool equipment. To attract new leads & customers, you're doing Google ads highlighting the various products you offer, such as Pool Pumps and Pool Cleaners.

If you were using a tool like Google Analytics to count visitors and form completions, you'd get something like this:

	Pool Pumps Campaign	Pool Cleaners Campaign
Spend	$2,000	$2,000
Visitors	200	100
Goal Completions	20	10

If that was all the data you had access to, then it would look like the Pool Pumps campaign was performing better than the Pool Cleaners campaign.

But what if you could see how many customers you got from each of these campaigns? Or how much revenue?

You'd get something like this:

	Pool Pumps Campaign	Pool Cleaners Campaign
Spend	$2,000	$2,000
Visitors	200	100
Leads	20	10
Customers	2	5
Revenue	$8,000	$25,000

When you're able to track how many customers and how much revenue you get from each of your Google Ad campaigns, you can start to see the real story.

Looking at the numbers above, you can see the Pool Cleaners Campaign is performing better:

You received more customers from the Pool Cleaners Campaign (5) than the Pool Pumps Campaign (2)
Your lead-to-customer conversion rate is five times greater for the Pool Cleaners Campaign (50% vs. 10%)
Your average customer value is higher for the Pool Cleaners Campaign: $5,000 per customer vs. $4,000 per customer from the Pool Pumps Campaign.
Your cost of acquiring a customer is lower through the Pool Cleaners Campaign: $400 vs. $1,000
Your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is three times higher in the Pool Cleaners Campaign

As the above analysis has shown, you get a much better understanding of what's working and what isn't when you can capture the source of every lead and track it through to customers and revenue.

4 simple steps to capture Google Ads data in FormCraft

Attributer makes it easy to capture Google Ads data in FormCraft. Here's how it works:

1. Add UTM parameters to your ads

Before you can collect Google Ads data in FormCraft forms, you first need to add UTM parameters to your ads.

In case you're not familiar with UTM parameters, they're basically additional bits of text you appended to the end of the URL you direct traffic to from your ads.

For instance, if your landing page URL is attributer.io/integrations/formcraft, your final URL with UTM parameters would look something like this:

attributer.io/integrations/formcraft?utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=brand-campaign

You can put whatever information you want in your UTM parameters, but the general best practice for Google Ads would be something like this:

UTM Medium = Paid search
UTM Source = Google
UTM Campaign = Your Google Ads campaign name
UTM Term = The ad group name the ad is part of
UTM Content = The specific ad

Luckily, adding UTM parameters to your URLs is an easy process that can be done using complimentary online tools like this one from UTM.io.

2. Add hidden fields to your forms

Once you've added UTM parameters to the URLs behind your Google Ads, the next step is to add a set of hidden fields to your lead capture forms.

In case you are not familiar with them, hidden fields are essentially form fields that are present on your form but are not visible to your website visitors, enabling tools like Attributer to write data into them without anyone seeing.

The following hidden fields should be added to your forms:

Channel
Channel Drilldown 1
Channel Drilldown 2
Channel Drilldown 3
Landing Page
Landing Page Group

Adding hidden fields to FormCraft is a straightforward process. All you have to do is drag and drop a 'Hidden' field type into your form.

3. Attributer writes Google Ads data into the hidden fields

After including the hidden fields in your forms, Attributer will start to track the source of your website visitors'.

Then, whenever a visitor submits a form on your site, Attributer will automatically populate the hidden fields with the Google Ads data taken from the UTM parameters.

To illustrate how this works, let's assume that you work as a marketer at Dropbox and a visitor arrives at your site through one of your Google Ads campaigns.

Depending on the UTM parameters used, Attributer would fill in the hidden fields as follows:

Channel = Paid search
Channel Drilldown 1 = Google
Channel Drilldown 2 = Brand campaign
Channel Drilldown 3 = Free account ad

In addition to capturing the UTM parameters, Attributer would also document the visitor's landing page (e.g., dropbox.com/features/cloud-storage) and the initial landing page group (e.g., features).

4. Google Ads data is captured in FormCraft

Then when a visitor submits a form, the Google Ads data is captured along with the lead's details (that they provided in the form), such as their name, email, company, phone number, etc.

With this information, you can do several things:

Add it to the new lead notification email you get from FormCraft
Send it to your CRM, including Salesforce, Pipedrive, Keap, etc.
Send it to a spreadsheet and create charts & graphs that show where your leads & customers are coming from

Why Attributer is the best way to capture Google Ads data in FormCraft

What makes Attributer the best option for capturing Google Ads data in FormCraft?

These 4 things:

1. Attributer captures all traffic sources

Attributer is not only a great tool for capturing Google Ads data in FormCraft but also provides information on the number of leads you're getting from other channels like Organic Social, Paid Social, and Organic Search.

WIth this data, you can see where ALL your leads and customers are coming from, not just those that come from your Google Ads campaigns.

This data can be incredibly valuable, particularly if you discover that (for example) your Facebook ads are generating more leads and customers than your Google Ads. In that case, you may want to switch some of your budget to your Facebook Ads to help grow your business.

2. Attributer remembers the data as visitors browse your site

Many other methods for capturing UTM parameters require the UTM parameters to be present in the URL on the page where the form is filled out.

This can pose challenges if the visitor completes the form on a different page from the one they initially landed on.

This is common when (for example) a visitor clicks on a Google Ad, lands on your homepage, and then proceeds to another page (like the Contact Us page) to fill out a form. In this case, the UTM parameters are lost because the form wasn't completed on the same page they landed on.

However, Attributer doesn't have this limitation because it stores the UTM parameters in a cookie in the visitor's browser. This ensures that the UTM parameters are captured by FormCraft, regardless of the page where the form is completed.

3. Provides cleaner data

If you're using other methods that only capture raw UTM parameters, you're likely to end up with quite messy data, making it challenging to run accurate reports.

For instance, imagine if some of your Google Ads campaigns have UTM_Source=Google.com (with a capital G), while others have UTM_Source=google (all lowercase, without a domain), and still others have UTM_Source=adwords.

This might seem a bit strange, but it's pretty common if you've had multiple people or agencies running your Google Ads campaigns for you.

If you were to just capture these raw UTM parameters in FormCraft and attempt to use them to calculate the number of leads you got from your Google Ads campaigns, you'll end up with three separate sources that you'd need to piece together.

However, Attributer is unique in that it detects inconsistencies in capitalization and other variations and would still be able to allocate leads to the appropriate channel (in this case, Paid search).

4. Attributer captures landing page data

Apart from capturing Google Ads data, Attributer also captures the landing page URL (e.g., https://attributer.io/blog/capture-utm-parameters-formcraft) and the landing page group (e.g., /blog).

This allows you to run reports that tell you the number of leads and customers you got from specific sections of your website (such as your blog), and even drill down further to determine the number of leads and customers obtained from individual blog posts.

Wrap up

If you're trying to measure the number of leads and customers you get from your Google Ads, then Attributer + FormCraft is a great solution.

It captures the UTM parameters you put behind your Google Ad campaigns, enabling you to pinpoint the specific campaigns, ad groups, and ads that each lead & customer has come from.

On top of this, it gives you informatio on leads & customers that come from other channels, meaning you can see the source of ALL your leads, not just those from Google Ads.

The best part? You can start using Attributer for free by registering for a 14-day trial!

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About the Author

Aaron Beashel is the founder of Attributer and has over 15 years of experience in marketing & analytics. He is a recognized expert in the subject and has written articles for leading websites such as Hubspot, Zapier, Search Engine Journal, Buffer, Unbounce & more. Learn more about Aaron here.