Need help with Google Tag Manager - Google Ads recording conversions which don't happen

Site URL: https://www.machina.academy/

Hello everyone!

We're struggling to setup our Google Tag Manager with Squarespace so it works as intended. We are using Squarespace Version 7.0

Our intended sales funnel is simple. Google Ads leads to our product pages which then link to our sign-up page (https://www.machina.academy/upis) - sorry it's in Croatian. The sign-up page generates an e-mail which leads to our main inbox.

The problem we're having is that Google Ads reports conversions which we don't see in our inbox. Our setup so far is as follows:
1) Google Ads has a a single active (Recording) conversion which is in the Contact category and is set up to count Every conversion.
2) Google Tag manger has a Google Ads Conversion Tracking tag and the Conversion Linker tag set up. The Conversion Linker is set up to trigger on All Pages. The trigger for the Google Ads Conversion Tracking is Form Submission which is set up to trigger on Some Forms which has the Page URL containing https://www.machina.academy/upis.
3) Squarespace is set up with appropriate header and footer code injection with the Google Tag manager (both have corresponding google IDs) and an additional Global Site Tag for Google Ads in the header for every page.

Can anyone point out any obvious mistake we've done in the setup?

Thanks,

Lovro

Dear Glyn,

thank you very much for your answer. We've taken on board your advice to record conversions via Analytics and have now set up a new thank you page that records visits as conversions. We've then imported that Analytics Goal into Ads and will see how it performs. 

I assume that means we can now delete the conversion triggers from our Google Tag Manager? We'll need to keep Google Tag script on the web for the Conversion Linker (I assume?). Is there, in your opinion, any benefit to having a single Google Tag script on the page versus having a separate script for Google Ads and an additional Google Tag script for the Conversion Linker? I'd like to reduce the amount of overhead we have in terms of cookies and scripts on the web.

Your help has been absolutely amazing because we're a small company and I'd love to buy you a beverage of your choice in some way! 🙂

Best, 

Lovro

If you are sending conversion events from Google Analytics there should be no need to have them also running from GTM using Google Ads, except as a fallback or monitoring mechanism - You send these conversion events to Google Ads but they are set not to record. I can't remember exactly the term but I basically you can send conversion events and not have them used on your reports. This can be quite handy because if you get weird results you can compare the number of conversions received in Google Analytics against those in Google Ads, and this can help identify anomalies. That's about it. I think Google Ads conversion events are in place because if you didn't use Google Analytics for your statistics  Google would need to give a company a way of configuring and sending these conversions. Maybe someone else can chime in if they see any other reason why you might prioritize Google Ads conversions over Google Analytics conversions, but we've never found a compelling reason.

Except for the reason highlighted above I'd not use Google Ads conversions at all, and you can reduce your code overheads by simply setting the trigger to fire on the pages where conversions occur rather than using an all pages trigger.

Hope that helps.

G.