How to capture Google Ads data in Gravity Forms
Learn how to capture Google Ads data in Gravity Forms so you know what campaigns are generating your leads, customers & revenue.
Are you struggling to know which of your Google Ads campaigns are actually generating customers & revenue?
Imagine if you could see exactly where each individual lead came from, right down to the campaign and ad they clicked. If you could do that, you’d know which campaigns and ads are actually generating customers & revenue and you’d be able to invest more in those.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can use Attributer to capture Google Ads data in Gravity Forms with every lead that comes through, and then ultimately how you can use it to track how each of your Google Ads campaigns are performing.
Why it’s important to track customers & revenue from Google Ads
Let’s imagine you run a business that sells and installs pool equipment. In order to promote your business you run ads on Google targeting different types of products you sell, such as Pool Pumps and Pool Cleaners.
If you were just using a tool like Google Analytics to measure visitors and form completions, you’d probably get something like this:
| Spend | $2,000 | $2,000 |
| Visitors | 200 | 100 |
| Goal Completions | 20 | 10 |
If this was the only information you had access to—visitors and leads from spend—then it would look like your Pool Pumps campaign was far outperforming your Pool Cleaners campaign and you’d like direct more of your budget to that.
However, imagine if you could see the results all the way through to the number of customers and amount of revenue generated.
You’d have something like this:
| 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 campaign effectiveness all the way through to customers and revenue, you can see the real story.
In this case, the Pool Cleaners Campaign is far better because:
- You got more customers from the Pool Cleaners Campaign (5) than the Pool Pumps Campaign (2)
- Your conversion rate from lead to customer is five times higher 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 you can see from the above analysis, when you can capture the source of every lead and track it all the way through to customers & revenue, you get a much better understanding of what’s working and what isn’t.
4 simple steps to capture Google Ads data in Gravity Forms
Attributer makes it easy to capture Google Ads data in Gravity forms. Here’s how it works:
1. Add UTM parameters to your ads
The first step for capturing Google Ads data in Gravity Forms is to add UTM parameters to your campaigns.
If you haven’t heard of UTM parameters before, they are basically extra bits of text that you add to the end of the URL you are sending people to from your campaigns.
So if the page you are sending someone to is attributer.io/integrations/salesforce then your final URL (with UTM parameters) might look a bit like this:
https://attributer.io/integrations/salesforce?utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=brand-campaign
Although you can structure the UTM parameters however you want, the general best practice for Google Ads is something like:
- UTM Medium = Paid search
- UTM Source = Google
- UTM Campaign = The name of your Google Ads campaign
- UTM Term = The name of the ad group the ad belongs to
- UTM Content = The specific ad
Tagging your URLs with UTM parameters is easy and there are free tools available on the web which can help you build them.
2. Add hidden fields to your forms
The second step is to add some hidden fields to your lead capture forms (i.e. the forms you use to collect information from site visitors). Here are the hidden fields you need to add to your forms:
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
- Landing Page
- Landing Page Group
Gravity Forms makes it super easy to add hidden fields. You simply drag and drop a ‘Hidden’ field type into the form. You can see further instructions here.
3. Attributer writes Google Ads data into the hidden fields
Now that you have the hidden fields set up, Attributer will monitor where your visitors are coming from and when they complete a form on your website, it populates the hidden fields with the values you specified in your UTM parameters.
As an example, if I was a marketer at Dropbox and a person came to my website from one of my brand campaigns in paid search, it would populate the hidden fields as follows:
- Channel = Paid search
- Channel Drilldown 1 = Google
- Channel Drildown 2 = Brand campaign
- Channel Drilldown 3 = Free account ad
On top of the values from the UTM parameters, it would also capture the visitor's first landing page (e.g: dropbox.com/features/cloud-storage) and the first landing page group (e.g: features).
4. Google Ads data is captured in Gravity Forms
Finally, when a visitor submits the form, the Google Ads data is captured alongside the information the lead entered into the form, such as their name, email, company, phone, etc.
You can then do a variety of different things with this information, including:
- Add it to each new lead notification email so you’ll be able to instantly see where each lead came from
- Send it to your CRM (including Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot & more) so your sales team can see where each lead has come from
- Use it to run reports that show you which Google Ads campaigns are actually generating you leads, customers & revenue.
Why using Attributer is the best way to capture Google Ads data in Gravity Forms
There are other methods for placing UTM parameters behind your Google Ads and capturing the data in Gravity Forms, so why is Attributer the best option?
Here’s why:
1. Captures all traffic
Not only is Attributer a great tool for capturing Google Ads data in Gravity Forms, but it can also track all the other sources of leads as well (Organic Search, Paid Social, Organic Social, etc)
This means that when you run reports to check where your leads and customers originate from, you can identify the source of ALL your leads, not just those from your Google Ads campaigns.
And this can be critical because if your SEO efforts are actually generating more leads and customers than your Google Ads campaigns, you want to know that so you can invest accordingly.
2. Remembers the data as visitors browse your site
Most other tools and methods for capturing UTM parameters require the UTM parameter to actually be present on the page where the form is completed. This is a problem because the page a visitor completes your form on may not be the same page they landed on from your ad.
As an example, imagine someone clicks one of your Google Ads and goes to a landing page you created for that campaign. Once they’re convinced your product or service is amazing, they click the ‘Get A Quote’ button and are taken to a different page to complete your quote request form. This would mean that the page they complete a form on is not the same page they originally landed on, so the UTM parameters are lost.
Attributer works differently. It stores the UTM parameters in a cookie in the user’s browser, meaning that regardless of what page the user completes a form on the UTM parameters will always be passed through.
Ultimately, this means that regardless of how many pages a user visits on your site before completing your form, you’ll always be able to track them back to your Google Ads.
3. Provides cleaner data
One of the problems with using other tools that capture raw UTM parameters is that you can end up with messy data that makes it difficult to run accurate reports.
As an example, imagine some of your Google Ads campaigns are tagged with UTM_Source= Google.com (capital G), others with UTM_Source= google (lowercase, no domain), and others with UTM_Source= adwords.
If you were to capture these raw UTM parameters in Gravity Forms and try to use them to see how many leads your Google Ads campaigns have brought you, you'll get three different sources that you would have to manually stitch together.
With Attributer, you don't have to deal with this because it takes the possibility of capitalization and other inconsistencies into account, and would ascribe leads to the Paid Search channel regardless.
4. Captures landing page data as well
Ever wanted to know how many leads and customers come from your blog? Or those in-depth content pieces you spent hours writing?
Attributer not only captures channel data (such as the fact they came from your Google Ads campaigns), but it also captures the landing page (I.e. attributer.io/blog/capture-utm-parameters) and the landing page category (I.e. /blog).
This means that you can see how well certain sections of your website are performing (e.g: your blog) in terms of generating leads, customers and revenue.
And because it captures both the landing page and the landing page group, you can look at how your blog is performing as a whole as well as what individual blog posts are driving the most leads, customers and revenue.
Wrap up
If you're wanting to track how many leads & customers you are getting from your Google Ads, then Attributer is a great solution.
It will capture the UTM parameters you use behind your Google Ad campaigns, which enables you to run reports that show which campaigns each of your leads and customers have come from.
On top of that, it will also give you data on leads that come from other channels, so you can track the source of ALL your leads (not just the ones from Google Ads) and ultimately know where you need to invest to grow your business.
Best of all, it's free to get started, so start your free trial today.
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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.