Easily capture Google Ads data in WP Forms
Discover how to capture Google Ads data in WP Forms to learn which campaigns are raking in your leads, revenue and customers.
Are you having difficulty knowing which of your Google Ads campaigns are actually attracting customers and revenue?
What if you could literally see the origin of all your leads, even to the campaign and ad they clicked? If this is doable for you, you’d know which campaign ads are actually creating customers and revenue, which can help you invest in these effective campaigns more.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to use Attributer to capture Google Ads in WP Forms with every lead that comes through and, in the end, how to use it to monitor all your Google Ads campaigns’ performance.
Why it's important to track customers and revenue from Google Ads
Envision that you run a business that sells and installs pool equipment. To spread the news about your business, you need to run ads on Google targeting the different types of products you offer, such as Pool Pumps and Pool Cleaners.
If you were just using a tool like Google Analytics to quantify visitors and form submissions, you’d most likely get something like this:
| Spend | $2,000 | $2,000 |
| Visitors | 200 | 100 |
| Goal Completions | 20 | 10 |
If the only information you have is on visitors and leads from spend, then it would look like your Pool Pumps campaign is doing better than your Pool Cleaners campaign, which would urge you to put more of your budget into the former.
On the other hand, what if you could see the results all the way to the number of customers and the amount of revenue made?
You’d get something like this:
| Spend | $2,000 | $2,000 |
| Visitors | 200 | 100 |
| Leads | 20 | 10 |
| Customers | 2 | 5 |
| Revenue | $8,000 | $25,000 |
When you have a way to monitor campaign performance in terms of customers and revenue, then you can clearly see what’s really happening.
In this situation, the Pool Cleaners Campaign is doing better because:
- You received more customers in the Pool Cleaners Campaign (5) than in the Pool Pumps Campaign (2)
- Your conversion rate from lead to customer is five times better in the Pool Cleaners Campaign (50% vs. 10%)
- Your average customer value is higher in the Pool Cleaners Campaign: $5,000 per customer vs. $4,000 per customer from the Pool Pumps Campaign.
- Your cost of getting customers is lower in the Pool Cleaners Campaign: $400 vs. $1,000
- Your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is three times higher in the Pool Cleaners Campaign
As shown above, when you have the data on the source of every lead and trace it to customers and revenue, you get a much better grasp on what’s working and what isn’t.
4 simple steps to capture Google Ads data in WP Forms
Attributer makes it easy to capture Google Ads data in WP Forms. Here's how it works:
1. Add UTM parameters to your ads
To kick things off, you need to add UTM parameters to your campaigns in order to capture Google Ads data in WP Forms.
If UTM parameters are a new term for you, they’re basically extra text you add to the end of the URL you send to people from your campaigns.
Hence if the page you want to send someone is attributer.io/integrations/salesforce, then your final URL (with UTM parameters) may look like this:
attributer.io/integrations/salesforce?utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=brand-campaign
Although you can structure the UTM parameters whichever way you like, the general best practice for Google Ads is something like this:
- 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
Putting UTM parameters in your URLs is easy, and free tools are available on the web to help you build them.
2. Add hidden fields to your forms
The second thing to do is to add some hidden fields to your lead capture forms (i.e., the forms you use to collect information from site visitors). The hidden fields you need to add are the following:
- Channel
- Channel Drilldown 1
- Channel Drilldown 2
- Channel Drilldown 3
- Landing Page
- Landing Page Group
Adding hidden fields in WP Form is super easy. Simply drag and drop a ‘Hidden’ field type into the form. Check further instructions here.
3. Attributer writes Google Ads data into the hidden fields
When the hidden fields have been set up, Attributer will trace where your visitors are coming from and when they submit a form on your site, it fills out the hidden fields with the value you put in your UTM parameters.
For instance, if I was a marketer at Dropbox and an individual visited my site from one of my brand campaigns in paid search, Attributer would fill out the hidden fields like so:
- Channel = Paid search
- Channel Drilldown 1 = Google
- Channel Drildown 2 = Brand campaign
- Channel Drilldown 3 = Free account ad
Aside from the values from the UTM parameters, Attributer 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 WP Forms
When the hidden fields are done being set up, the Google Ads data is captured when the visitor submits the form. The information entered in the form (the lead’s name, email, company, phone, etc.) is also captured along with the Google Ads data.
From here, you can do a couple of different things with the captured information, like:
- Add it to each new lead notification email so you can automatically see where each lead came from
- Send it to your CRM (including Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, etc) so your sales team can see where each lead originated from
- Use it to run reports telling you which Google Ads campaigns are generating leads, customers, and revenue.
Why using Attributer is the best way to capture Google Ads data in WP Forms
Here's why you should choose Attributer for your business:
1. Captures all traffic
In addition to Attributer being an efficient tool for capturing Google Ads data in WP Forms, it can also monitor all the other sources of leads (Organic Social, Organic Search, Paid Social, etc.)
With this information, you can build reports to see where your leads and customers are coming from and determine the source of ALL your leads, not just the ones from your Google Ads campaigns.
This can be critical for your business, especially if your SEO efforts generate most of the leads and customers compared to your Google Ads campaigns. You would want to know this so you can invest better and correctly.
2. Remembers the data as visitors browse your site
Having the UTM parameters present on the page where the form is completed is a common requirement for most UTM capturing tools and methods. This poses a problem whenever a visitor completes a form on a different page than the one they first landed on from your ad.
For example, visualize someone clicking your Google Ads and then being taken to the campaign's landing page. Once they've decided they want your product or service, they click on the 'Get A Quote' button, which will take them to a new page to fill up and submit your quote request form. This means that the page they submit a form on isn't the exact page they initially landed on, and hence the UTM parameters are lost.
You don't have to deal with this with Attributer because it stores the UTM parameters in a cookie in the user's browser, meaning regardless of what page the user completes a form on, the UTM parameters will always be sent through.
In the end, this means that no matter what your visitor's navigation activity on your site before completing your form, you can always track them back to your Google Ads.
3. Provides cleaner data
One of the setbacks with using other tools to capture raw UTM parameters is that you usually end up with messy data, making it challenging to create accurate reports.
For instance, pretend 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 capture these raw UTM parameters in WP Forms and use them to determine the number of leads from your Google Ads, you’ll receive three different sources you need to stitch manually together.
This won’t happen with Attributer because it recognizes the possibility of capitalization and other inconsistencies and would assign leads to the Paid Search channel regardless.
4. Captures landing page data as well
Are you curious about how many leads and customers are attracted by your blog and other in-depth content pieces you worked on for hours?
Attributer can help with this as it 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).
With this data available, you’ll see and monitor the performance of specific sections on your site (e.g., your blog) in terms of generating leads, customers and revenue.
And since it secures both the landing page and the landing page group, you can see how your blog is performing as a whole and zoom in on individual blog posts to see which ones drive the most leads, customers and revenue.
Wrap up
If you’ve been looking to trace the number of leads and customers you get from your Google Ads, then Attributer is a proven solution.
It will capture the UTM parameters behind your Google Ad campaigns, which allows you to build reports that display the campaigns each of your leads has come from.
Moreover, it will also provide data on leads that come from other channels. This way, you can track the source of ALL your leads (not just the ones from Google Ads) and ultimately know where you need to invest in optimizing your business.
Have we mentioned that it’s free to get started? Start your free trial today and see if it’s for you.
Get Started For Free
Start your 14-day free trial of Attributer today!
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.