Track WPForms submissions as conversions in Google Ads

Google Ads can drive a steady stream of new leads for your business, but getting conversion tracking dialled in correctly is surprisingly painful.

If you try to use tools like Google Tag Manager, you'll quickly find yourself writing custom JavaScript to listen for form submissions, trying to extract data from the form and hashing it with SHA-256, then juggling a maze of triggers, tags, variables, and other moving parts to get the data over to Google Ads.

And if you take the simpler route of tracking thank-you page visits, you can end up losing as many as 30% of your conversions to things like ad blockers, browser privacy protections (Safari being a notable culprit), and people who click your ad on mobile but only convert later from their laptop.

So what's the right approach?

This guide walks through how to set up reliable conversion tracking in Google Ads when a WPForms form is submitted on your WordPress site, using a method called server-side tracking.

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

Reliable conversion tracking is the foundation of any successful Google Ads account.

That's because Google Ads has smart bidding technology that combines thousands of signals (location, purchase history, time of day, and plenty more) to predict whether a particular searcher is likely to buy from you, then bids higher or lower in the auction based on whether it thinks that person is a good fit for your business.

It's really powerful technology, but it only works if you have reliable conversion tracking set up. Google has to be able to see "this person converted and this one didn't" so it can learn what a good lead looks like for your business.

The catch with the usual tracking tactics (thank-you page visits or Google Tag Manager events) is that they all push the conversion through the user's browser. That approach has a few weak points:

• Ad Blockers — Ad blockers prevent the Google Tag from loading on your website, which means it can't track anything a user does when they land on your site (including submitting a form).
• Privacy Features in Browsers — Web browsers like Safari have built-in technologies that block the Google Tag from tracking visitors for more than a day (so if a person clicks your ad and then converts 3 days later, it won't be tracked).
• Using multiple devices — People might click your ad on their work computer but later convert on their home computer (or on their mobile device), which means their original ad click can't be tied to their later conversion because they happened on different devices.

This is exactly why server-side tracking matters. Rather than relying on things to happen in the visitor's browser and hoping it all works, you send a direct, private message to Google's servers with all the lead's details (which means the data isn't blocked by ad blockers or privacy settings).

And the approach has been proven to work significantly better. In fact, Google's own data shows that server-side tracking typically results in a 23% average increase in total recorded conversions and a 10% reduction in cost per conversion (because Google's algorithms can understand who your ideal customer is and serve your ads to them more prominently).

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

Here are the 3 steps to wire up server-side conversion tracking between WPForms and Google Ads.

Step 1: Build your Conversion Flow in Converly

Converly is purpose-built to make sending server-side conversions from WPForms to Google Ads as painless as possible.

The screenshot above shows Converly's drag-and-drop workflow builder, which should look pretty familiar if you've spent time in tools like Zapier or any sort of email automation tool.

You start by choosing your trigger (a WPForms entry being submitted in this case), then layer on the actions you want to fire (such as a conversion being sent to Google Ads).

Honestly, that's the whole setup. A handful of clicks later and your server-side conversion tracking is live in Google Ads.

Step 2: Add the Converly code to your website

After your Conversion Flow is published, Converly gives you a small snippet of code to add to your WordPress site.

There are 3 easy ways to drop this onto a WordPress site. Most themes have a built-in header/scripts area where you can paste it. If yours doesn't, a free plugin like Insert Headers and Footers (WPCode) does the same job in one click. Or if you already manage your tags through Google Tag Manager, you can deploy it as a custom HTML tag.

Step 3: Test it works

The last thing to do is jump back over to your site and submit a real entry through one of your forms to verify everything's wired up correctly.

Next, head into your Conversion Flow in Converly, click the 3 dots menu in the top right corner, and choose View Logs.

When the logs page loads, click on your test entry to expand the full record. You'll be able to see all the data Converly captured about the lead as well as if the conversion made it to Google Ads.

And then if you drill in another level, you'll see every field that was passed across to Google Ads, along with the response Google sent back.

If your test entry is sitting in the log and you can see it was successfully sent to Google Ads, your conversion tracking is good to go. From start to finish, the whole setup typically takes about 5-10 minutes.

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

There are other ways you can send conversions to Google Ads when someone submits a WPForms form on your site, so why pick Converly over the alternatives? A few reasons stand out:

1. Easy to set up

The most common method of sending conversions to Google Ads is using Google Tag Manager.

But that involves writing custom code to listen for WPForms submissions (WPForms processes entries through wpforms_process_complete PHP actions and AJAX submissions, neither of which GTM picks up natively, so you have to build a custom event listener yourself). You then need to extract the lead's name and email from the form and write it into the DataLayer, figure out how to anonymise the data with SHA-256 (required by Google), and then configure variables, triggers and tags to send it all over to Google Ads.

Unless you're a Google Tag Manager expert, you are going to spend countless hours trying to figure all that out.

Fortunately, Converly makes it much easier. You simply pick a trigger (like a WPForms form being submitted on your site) and choose what should happen as a result (a conversion getting sent to Google Ads). Converly then handles all of that complexity for you. No writing custom code, no trying to figure out what SHA-256 is, just simple conversion tracking that works.

2. Not affected by ad blockers and privacy restrictions

If you're using a tool like Google Tag Manager (or doing something basic like tracking thank-you page visits), then a significant percentage of your conversions aren't going to make it back to Google thanks to ad blockers and privacy-focused browsers preventing the Google Tag from loading on your site.

In fact, a study that analysed over 7 million conversions found that tag-based tracking was missing roughly 30% of conversions. About 5% of those losses were down to ad blockers, and the larger share (around 25%) came from browser-level privacy measures.

But because Converly sends conversions directly to Google's servers, it isn't impacted by ad blockers or privacy-focused browsers, so you'll get far more accurate results.

3. Works across devices

Plenty of leads will first discover your business on one device (often their phone during a commute) and only come back to submit a form much later from another device entirely.

Browser-based tracking tools like Google Tag Manager have no way of bridging those two sessions because they happen on entirely separate devices.

Converly handles this by passing identity signals (name, email, and so on) straight to Google's servers. Google can then match the eventual conversion back to that very first ad click on the phone, so the campaign that actually generated the lead gets the credit it's owed.

4. Sends more data

Beyond just the lead's name, email, and phone, Converly also sends technical signals like the GCLID, IP address, and User Agent across to Google Ads.

The benefit is that Google Ads ends up receiving a rich profile of the lead, giving it everything it needs to confidently tie that conversion back to the original ad click (even if it happened on a different device weeks earlier).

For you, that translates into more conversions recorded accurately and far better data to optimise with inside Google Ads.

5. Supports multiple tools and platforms

Converly plays nicely with over 100 different form builders, scheduling apps, chat widgets, and beyond.

On the destination side, it can push conversion events into Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, and many more.

That means if you start using a new tool on your site (like a chat or scheduling widget), or you start advertising on a new ad platform, you won't be stuck rebuilding your conversion tracking. Just add it as a new action in Converly and you're up and running.

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

When you have real, accurate conversion tracking set up in Google Ads, it enables you to do a whole heap of things you couldn't previously.

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

When you have accurate conversion tracking set up, you can look in your Google Ads account and see more than just impressions and clicks. You can see the number of conversions, the conversion rate, the cost per conversion, the return on ad spend, and a whole lot more.

You can even see these numbers broken down by campaign, ad group, keyword, ad, country and a whole lot more.

This gives you much deeper insights into how your Google Ads are performing and where the biggest opportunities to grow are.

2. Use Google's Smart Bidding technology

Instead of manual bidding (where you tell Google "I'll pay up to $3 per click"), Smart Bidding lets you tell Google a target outcome (for example, $45 per lead) and it will handle the bidding for you.

It uses everything it knows about each searcher (age, location, device, interests, browsing history, purchase history and more) to automatically raise or lower the bid based on how likely they are to convert into a lead.

It's one of the easiest ways to get better results from your Google Ads, but the catch is that none of this works without solid conversion tracking in place. You need to be able to reliably tell Google 'This person converted and this person didn't' so that it knows what a "good" searcher looks like for your business. Otherwise, it could easily bid aggressively on the wrong people and quickly chew through your budget.

By pairing Converly's accurate server-side tracking with Google's Smart Bidding, you give the algorithm the fuel it needs to bring in more leads at a lower cost per lead.

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

Sending reliable conversion data into Google Ads also lets you build remarketing audiences of people who visited your site but never actually completed a form and converted.

From there, you can win those visitors back through a few different channels:

• Search — Set higher (or lower) bids specifically for these users when they search relevant keywords later on.
• Display — Serve display ads to them as they browse the wider web (using Google's Display Network), keeping your brand top of mind and driving them back to your site.
• YouTube — Target them with video ads on YouTube so they regularly see your message during normal viewing.

Wrap Up

For anyone looking to push a conversion into Google Ads whenever a WPForms form is submitted on their WordPress site, Converly is a great way to make it happen.

Conversions are sent directly to Google's servers so they can't be interfered with by ad blockers and privacy-focused browsers, and Converly enriches each one with plenty of context about the lead (name, email, phone, Google Click ID, IP address, User Agent, and more) so Google has the best possible chance of tying the conversion back to the click that drove it.

The setup itself takes just a few minutes, and there's a 14-day free trial waiting for you, so check it out today!