The best way to track Acuity Scheduling bookings as conversions in Google Ads

Google Ads can be a great way to get new leads and customers for your business, but getting conversion tracking properly set up is weirdly difficult.

If you use Google Tag Manager, you'll have to write custom code to listen for each new booking, then set up triggers, tags, variables and a long list of other things to get it all working.

And the usual shortcuts aren't much better. Acuity doesn't allow you to redirect people to a thank you page, and you can't track a button click because Acuity lives inside an iFrame on your website.

So what's the best approach?

This article walks through how to properly track conversions in Google Ads when someone books an appointment through Acuity Scheduling, using an approach known as server-side tracking.

The typical ways of tracking conversions in Google Ads, like firing events through Google Tag Manager, all have a couple of issues:

• Ad Blockers. Ad blockers stop the Google Tag from loading in the visitor's browser when they land on your site, so nothing the visitor does on your site ever gets recorded.
• Privacy features in browsers. Browsers like Safari cut off the Google Tag from following visitors after a day or so, so if someone clicks your ad today and makes a booking three days later, it's impossible to connect the two.
• People switching devices. A prospect might click your ad on their phone one day but come back and finish booking an appointment from their laptop another day, and browser tracking has no way to link those two events together because they happen on different devices.

This is exactly why server-side tracking matters. Rather than waiting on something to happen in the browser (like a visitor reaching a confirmation page) and hoping the Google Tag catches it, you send a direct, private message to Google's servers with the lead's details, so ad blockers and privacy settings can't get in the way.

The numbers show how impactful this is. Google's own data shows that using server-side tracking results in a 23% average increase in total recorded conversions and a 10% cut in cost per conversion, largely because Google's algorithms have the data they need to learn who your ideal customer is and can then use it to serve your ads to them.

There are two main ways to approach this, and which one fits depends on when you want the conversion to be sent back to Google Ads.

A tool like Converly makes it simple to fire a server-side conversion to Google Ads when someone books an appointment through Acuity Scheduling.

Rather than wrestling with Google Tag Manager to detect the booking, pull out the client's details, hash them with SHA-256 and send them over to Google's API, you get a clean visual builder for putting your conversion flow together.

You pick a trigger (like a new appointment being booked through Acuity Scheduling) and choose the actions that should happen (like sending a conversion to Google Ads).

From there, Converly handles it all for you. It listens for new appointments, captures the GCLID, IP address, USer Agent, etc, gets the client's name, email and phone number via the Acuity Scheduling API, hashes them with SHA-256, and passes them to Google Ads. Sending all of this data to Google means it can tie the booking back to the exact campaign, ad and keyword that they originally clicked.

As a result, you get all the benefits of server-side tracking (that 23% average lift in recorded conversions and 10% drop in cost per conversion we mentioned) without writing any custom code, or needing to understand what SHA-256 is, or how to send information to Google's API yourself.

If your Acuity Scheduling bookings get sent into a CRM or like a clinic management system, you can actually wait and send the conversion back to Google Ads later once the lead actually turns into a paying customer.

The way to do it is to capture a bit of extra data with every booking and save it with each client. Here's how that works:

Most ad platforms, like Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc. need a good number of conversions to be sent to them in order for their algorithms to learn what an ideal customer looks like for you (and to then server your ads to similar people).

Google Ads official documentation says their smart bidding strategies (like Maximise Conversions, Target CPA, etc) need about 50 conversions per month per campaign to start working. Meta's Advantage+ ad targeting needs 50 conversions per week per ad set.

So even though it might seem like a good idea to only send conversions back to ad platforms when a person becomes a customer, unless you're getting a high volume of new customers each week/month, you likely won't have enough conversion data to make it worthwhile.

That's why it's usually better to send the conversion when the form is submitted, and the lead is first created, as the extra volume will be more useful to the algorithms (most businesses get more leads per month than they do customers, as only a % of leads turn into customers).

Here are the four big reasons it's the most dependable way to track conversions:

Old-school tracking methods (like counting thank you page visits, or using Google Tag Manager) depend on scripts loading in the visitor's browser, and ad blockers and privacy-first browsers frequently stop those scripts from loading at all.

Recent research puts the share of internet users running some form of ad blocker at north of 30%, so it's a significant number.

But because server-side tracking sends the conversion straight to Google's servers, ad blockers and privacy restrictions in browsers can't get in the way, and every lead gets counted.

Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) tends to clear tracking cookies within a day or two, so the link between an ad click and the eventual conversion goes away if someone doesn't book the same day.

With server-side tracking, you send the name, email, phone and so on to Google with each conversion, which makes it possible for Google to tie the conversion back to the original ad click no matter how long it's been.

Plenty of leads will first come across your site on one device (e.g. their phone) but hold off until they're at a computer to actually book their appointment.

Ordinary browser tracking can't join those two visits because they happen on separate devices. But by sending lead data like name, email, and phone to Google's servers, you're giving Google the data it needs to stitch these two sessions together and give your ads proper credit for starting things off.

On top of everything else, browser-based tracking is highly prone to other errors, particularly if you do things like track thank you page visits or clicks of the booking button. A client could close click the ‘Book Now’ button but miss a required field on the form, in which case the conversion has counted but the booking was never made. And if they fix the error and click the button again, you've now logged two conversions for one booking.

Server-side tracking is far tidier. It logs a conversion only when a booking genuinely goes through, not when a confirmation page loads or a button is clicked, so your Google Ads conversion counts stay much closer to the real number of appointments you're actually getting.

Across 15 years leading marketing teams, I've spent millions of dollars on Google Ads and built more reports than I can count trying to see what was actually working.

Here are the 3 I kept coming back to:

Most businesses bid on a bunch of keywords across several campaigns, often for different services (a financial advisory firm might bid on retirement planning in one place and estate planning in another).

This report shows which of those keywords are actually producing conversions, rather than just generating impressions and clicks that never turn into real leads.

It makes it easy to see which keywords are working for your business and which aren't, and ultimately which ones you should put more budget into to drive more bookings.

If you're sending conversions back to Google Ads from your CRM, you can usually attached a value to the conversion (usually by getting the value of the deal from the CRM, or the cost of the appointment from your clinic management tool)

That matters because customers aren't all worth the same. For a wealth management firm, a client who comes in through a basic financial review campaign is worth nowhere near as much as as a person who clicks through on a philanthropic services campaign, so treating them equally would be a mistake.

So by sending a conversion value to Google Ads from your CRM, you can run reports showing you earned $1000 from leads on one campaign and $10,000 from another. That makes deciding where your budget should go far more straightforward.

This report is great for businesses that win most of their clients locally (financial advisors, accounting firms, law practices, and the like). It breaks your conversions down by geographic region.

You can keep it broad (country, state or city) or drill right down to an individual postcode. Either way, you get to see whether your bookings are genuinely coming from the areas you want to serve, or whether you're paying to show your ads to people in suburbs that just aren't realistic to service.

With that information in hand, Location Bid Adjustments let you act on it. You can tell Google to bid harder in the postcodes where your ideal customers live, and ease off (or stop entirely) in the others.

Getting proper conversion tracking set up in Google Ads can genuinely help you get more leads at a lower cost.

It gives you the numbers you need to make manual tweaks (bidding up on particular keywords or locations, for example), but more importantly, it gives Google's algorithms the data they need to handle automated bidding for you.

But all of that hinges on the conversion data being accurate. Track thank-you page visits or fire events from the browser through Google Tag Manager, and you're not really sending reliable data, and your Google Ads results will suffer as a result.

So whatever setup you land on, and whenever you choose to fire the conversion (at the point of booking, once the lead becomes a customer, etc), make sure you are sending it server-side because that is what gets you the best results.