Did you know that reporting accurate data about qualified leads, ecommerce purchases, and quotes/demos sent can improve your Google Ads and Meta Ads ROAS by 500% or more using the exact same creative? Find out how accurate the conversion tracking you’re providing to Google and Meta on behalf of our clients using this quick 10 question quiz.
X (formerly Twitter) Conversion Tracking Setup w/GTM (Google Tag Manager)
Love it or hate it, X is a platform that has a lot of eyeballs. One of the most interesting upgrades to twitter is the blue check/verified changes that @elonmusk and team has made. Now you have to pay a monthly fee and/or submit a copy of a government ID to access a number of twitter account benefits. New advertiser accounts require buying a blue checkmark to get started.
The X (formerly Twitter) Ads team has been working to improve the self service platform. One area that has seen recent updates is the pixel/conversion tracking setup. Small business advertisers are most likely to benefit from manually adding the pixel to their site or using a tag manager such as GTM (Google Tag Manager) to install the code.
If you want to advertise on any platform, it is important to set up accurate, reliable conversion tracking to ensure you have visibility into the moments that matter in the customer journey. For this post we will assume you already know how to install Google Tag Manager on your website and have installed your Google Tag Manger Container.
Setting up the Base Pixel
Using Google Tag Manager to implement the X base pixel is fairly straightforward. Full instructions are available here but you basically need to add the X pixel from the third party tag gallery, then enter your X ID.
Setting up the Event Pixel
Event Details
Setup Method
We’ll choose “Define event with code”
Event Intallation
We’ll use Install with Tag manager. This will generate an event ID. I’ve redacted my specific ID, but yours will be a string of numbers and letters, usually including a dash or two.
Click “Add new tag” in Google Tag Manager
Select the X/Twitter event pixel from the gallery and enter your ID. Then choose a firing condition that makes sense for your use case, i.e. button click, thank you pageview, etc.
That’s it!
You should be all set to track a simple conversion such as a form fill that leads to a thank you page, or click on a CTA button. You can add more advanced parameters including:
- Value
- Currency
- Contents
- Status
- Conversion ID
- Email address
- Phone number
It is simple to add a static value and currency using either google tag manager or manual edits to the pixel code. With some coding skill, you can add dynamic variables such as phone number extracted from form fill. After you’ve implemented the base code and event tracking for your most valuable user actions, you can use the “Twitter PIxel Helper” browser extension to confirm that your tracking is in place. Finally, be sure to monitor your conversion tracking setup closely for at least the first week or two after launching your ads campaign.
Questions? Comments? @ us in X Want better results from your Google and X Ads campaigns? Schedule a strategy session with PPC Better.
Pest Control Company and PPC Better
Situation Overview
A well established pest control company, with offices in seven distinct geographic locations, came to us with a common problem. “Google Ads are way too expensive lately.” They’ve been advertising with Google Ads for years, but lately, the leads were getting more and more expensive, to the point where they felt like it might not be profitable to continue with Google Ads.
We started with an audit of their existing campaigns and found many common errors to fix and areas for improvement. In this case study we will look at year over year performance of the campaigns and the agency running them. We’ll compare the campaign and agency performance based on three main categories.
- Strategy and planning.
- Execution and optimization.
- Key Performance Indicators
Account Review and Agency Performance
Strategy and planning
The previous agency used a reasonably good structure for the times, but missed several key opportunities. The vast majority of the traffic came from broad match keywords. This allowed customers who were searching for a specific competitor to click the ads. We found these clicks to have a lower conversion rate on the site, and even worse performance, compared to generic pest control queries, once the agent connected to the customer.
We planned to block competitor traffic from the primary non branded search campaign, but test a “conquesting” campaign to specifically target those customers and attempt to convince them to buy from us instead. We also added an extensive list of exact and phrase match keywords. This allowed us to drive more traffic from historically high converting queries.
Execution and Optimization
We convinced the client team to aggregate their locations into the same campaign. This helped reduce cost per click substantially. We also categorized the keyword traffic into Brand, Generic, and Conquest categories. This gave us a much better read on performance by category and allowed us to deploy budget accordingly. We also moved to manual cost per click bidding, then target cost per lead bidding after sufficient conversion data had been generated. This was a key factor in the moves we see in the key performance indicators. We also set up and did extensive troubleshooting on the conversion tracking to ensure that leads via phone call and form fill were accurately tracked and reported to Google Ads for bid optimization.
Key Performance Indicators – Year over Year comparison Q4 2022 vs 2021
| Agency | Clicks | Cost | Leads | Cost per Click | Cost per Lead |
| The other guys | 1,246 | $21,705 | 251 | $17.49 | $86.84 |
| PPC Better | 2,445 | $21,988 | 631 | $8.99 | $34.85 |
We increased traffic by 96%, increased leads by 151% and decreased cost per lead 60%.
Conclusion
PPC Better substantially improved performance for a multi location pest control company’s Google Ads campaigns. We deployed our standard paid search optimization strategies. In this case there was a dramatic impact on cost per click. We were able to buy higher quality traffic at a lower price resulting in a dramatic increase in leads. Our campaign strategies and structure work consistently for many categories of lead generation focused advertisers. Request a free strategy session to learn more about how PPC Better can help.
Our internal Google Ads campaign
We buy Google Ads exactly the way we tell you to. Schedule a strategy session to learn more about how PPC Better can help you today!
