Track Unbounce form submissions as conversions in Google Ads

Google Ads is one of the best ways to bring in new leads and customers, but getting conversion tracking set up correctly is surprisingly difficult.

If you try to use a tool like Google Tag Manager, you end up writing custom code to detect form submissions, then wiring together triggers, tags, variables and a pile of other fiddly settings.

And the simpler approaches, like counting visits to a thank-you page, tend to leak. You can lose up to 30% of your conversions to ad blockers, the privacy features baked into browsers like Safari, or someone tapping your ad on their phone and only converting later at their desk.

Fortunately, there is a better way to do it.

In this guide, we'll walk through how to set up proper conversion tracking in Google Ads whenever someone fills out a form on your Unbounce landing page (using a method called server-side tracking).

Why you need to send conversions to Google Ads server-side

Accurate conversion tracking is the foundation of everything that works well in Google Ads.

Google Ads runs on smart bidding, which weighs thousands of signals (where someone is, what time it is, their past behaviour, and so on) to judge how likely a given person is to buy from you. It then bids up or down in the auction, depending on how good a fit that person looks.

For any of that to work, the conversion data feeding it has to be accurate. Google needs to know "this person converted, this one didn't" so it can learn what your best customers actually look like.

The trouble with the usual tactics (counting thank you page views, or firing tags through Google Tag Manager) is that they report conversions through the visitor's browser. That creates a few problems:

• Ad Blockers - Ad blockers stop the Google Tag from loading at all, so nothing the visitor does on your page gets recorded.
• Privacy Features in Browsers - Browsers like Safari actively limit how long the Google Tag can track a visitor (often to a single day), so a click today and a conversion three days later never get connected.
• Using multiple devices - Someone might click your ad on their work laptop and then come back to convert on their phone or home computer, which breaks the link between the original click and the conversion.

This is exactly why server-side tracking matters. Rather than hoping something fires correctly inside the visitor's browser, you send a direct, private message straight to Google's servers with the lead's details, so the data can't be stripped out by ad blockers or privacy settings.

The difference is well documented. Google's own figures show that server-side tracking usually lifts total recorded conversions by around 23% and cuts cost per conversion by about 10%, simply because the bidding algorithms have cleaner data to learn from.

3 simple steps to send server-side conversions to Google Ads from Unbounce

Here are the 3 steps to get server-side conversion tracking running between your Unbounce landing pages and Google Ads.

Step 1: Build your Conversion Flow in Converly

Converly is a tool built to make sending server-side conversions from Unbounce to Google Ads about as painless as it gets.

As the screenshot above shows, Converly gives you a simple workflow builder. If you've spent any time in tools like Zapier or HubSpot Workflows, it'll feel immediately familiar.

You simply choose your trigger (such as a form submission on an Unbounce page), then pick the actions you want to take (such as sending a conversion to Google Ads).

And that's really it. A few clicks later, you've got server-side conversion tracking wired up to Google Ads.

Step 2: Add the Converly code to your landing page

After you've built your Conversion Flow and hit publish, Converly gives you a short snippet of code to place on your Unbounce page.

In Unbounce, you can add this through the page's Javascript settings (placed in the head), or push it across all your pages using Unbounce's script manager. Prefer to manage your scripts through Google Tag Manager? That works just as well.

Step 3: Test it works

The last thing to do is confirm it all fires correctly. To do so, head to your Unbounce landing page and submit the form yourself.

Then jump back into your Conversion Flow, click the 3 dots menu in the top right, and choose View Logs.

On the logs page, open up your test entry to see every detail about it, including whether it made it through to Google Ads.

You can dig even deeper to see exactly what was sent to Google Ads, what Google's servers sent back, and so on.

If your test submission shows up in the log and you can see it was delivered to Google Ads, your conversion tracking is set up correctly. Start to finish, the whole thing usually takes under 5 minutes.

Why Converly is the best way to send conversions to Google Ads from Unbounce

There are other ways to send conversions into Google Ads when someone submits an Unbounce form, so why choose Converly?

A handful of reasons make it an easy choice:

1. Easy to set up

The go-to method for most people is Google Tag Manager. But that means writing custom code to catch form submissions, pulling the lead's name and email out of the form and into the DataLayer, hashing the data with SHA-256 the way Google requires, and then setting up variables, triggers and tags to tie it all together.

Unless you genuinely know Google Tag Manager inside out, you can lose hours to that process.

Converly makes it so much easier. You pick a trigger (a form being submitted on your Unbounce page) and choose what should happen as a result (a conversion landing in Google Ads). No custom code, no tangled setup, just conversion tracking that works.

2. Not affected by ad blockers and privacy restrictions

If you use Google Tag Manager (or something basic like counting thank you page visits) then a real chunk of your conversions simply won't reach Google, because ad blockers and privacy-first browsers block the Google Tag from loading on your page in the first place.

One study that looked at more than 7 million conversions found tag-based tracking was missing roughly 30% of them. About 5% of that came from ad blockers, with the bigger slice (around 25%) down to browser privacy measures.

But because Converly delivers conversions straight to Google's servers, none of that applies, so your numbers end up far closer to reality.

3. Works across devices

Imagine this: someone first lands on your page on one device (their phone, say) but waits until they're back at a computer to actually fill out the form.

If your conversions are only being sent through the browser (as they are with Google Tag Manager), there's no way to stitch those two visits together, because they happened on separate devices.

Converly sends identity data, such as name and email, directly to Google's servers, which lets Google connect the conversion to the original ad click on the phone. The benefit of this is that your ads finally get credit for the conversions they actually drove.

4. Sends more data

Converly doesn't just pass along the lead's name, email and phone to help Google match the click to the conversion. It also captures the technical signals (the GCLID, IP address, User Agent and more) and sends those across too.

That gives Google Ads a rich picture of the person who converted, which it can use to match them back to an ad click far more reliably (even one that happened weeks earlier on a completely different device).

For you, that translates into more accurate conversion tracking and better data to make decisions with inside Google Ads.

5. Gives you a full conversion log + email notifications

When you use tools like Google Tag Manager to send conversions to Google Ads, you have no idea if it's actually working or not. You can run some initial tests when you set it up, but unless you repeat those tests weekly, you'll have no idea if your conversion tracking is silently broken (maybe because someone changed something on the website, in Google Tag Manager, or in Google Ads).

But with Converly, you get a full conversion log that shows you every conversion that happened, what data was captured, what data was sent to Google Ads, what response was received from Google Ads, and more.

You can also configure email notifications to alert you when a new conversion is sent to Google Ads, or set them up only to alert when something fails (so that you always know instantly if your conversion tracking breaks).

6. Supports multiple tools and platforms

Converly can listen for conversions in over 100 different form builders, scheduling tools, chat widgets and more.

And on the delivery side, it can push conversion events to Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads and plenty of other platforms.

So if you add a new tool to your site (like a Calendly scheduling widget), or start advertising on a new channel (like Meta or LinkedIn), there's no need to rebuild anything. A few clicks in Converly and your conversion tracking is set up and working.

3 things you can do when you properly send conversions to Google Ads from Unbounce

Once you've got real, accurate conversion tracking flowing into Google Ads, it opens up a whole range of things that simply weren't possible before.

1. Report on conversions by campaign, ad group, keyword, etc.

With accurate conversion tracking in place, your Google Ads account shows you far more than impressions and clicks. You can see conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion, return on ad spend, and plenty more.

Better still, you can break all of that down by campaign, ad group, keyword, ad, country, and more.

That gives you a much clearer read on how your Google Ads are actually performing, and where your biggest opportunities to grow really sit.

2. Use Google's Smart Bidding technology

With manual bidding you're essentially saying "I'll pay $3 a click". But with smart bidding, you tell Google your real goal (say, $45 per conversion) and it bids in the auction on your behalf. It factors in everything it knows about each searcher (age, location, device, past behavior, and so on) and decides whether to bid high or low based on how likely they are to convert.

It's extremely effective, but it only works if your conversion tracking is accurate. Without it, Google has no idea what a "good" searcher looks like for your business, so it ends up bidding aggressively to win clicks from the wrong people, which quietly drains your budget and pushes costs up.

But if you set up accurate server-side conversion tracking with Converly, you can get the most out of Google's smart bidding, pulling in more leads at a lower cost.

3. Retarget people who visited your page but didn't convert

When you feed accurate conversion data into Google Ads, you can build remarketing lists made up of people who visited your landing page but didn't convert.

From there you can retarget those people in a few different ways:

• Search - Bid higher (or lower, your call) for these people when they search your keywords down the track.
• Display - Run display ads across the Google Display network aimed only at these people, so your brand keeps showing up as they move around the web.
• YouTube - Run YouTube ads pointed exclusively at this group, so they keep seeing you on YouTube.

Wrap Up

If you want a conversion sent to Google Ads every time someone fills out a form on your Unbounce landing page, Converly is a great way to make it happen.

It delivers those conversions straight to Google's servers, so they aren't blocked by ad blockers or privacy-focused browsers, and it sends across a wealth of detail about the lead (name, email, phone, IP address, User Agent and more) so Google has the best possible shot at matching the conversion to the original ad click.

Best of all, you can have it running in a few minutes, and it comes with a 14-day free trial, so give it a go today!