Question

Ok I’m hoping I found a huge answer here and just looking for some confirmation as to whether my logic checks out. I’ve been running search ads for my FIRST client since November and running on super high intent keywords so started off great through the end of the year. In 2020, still plenty of clicks through but virtually NOTHING happening on the site even though nothing has changed there. Our conversion tracking through Google Analytics has never been reliable(don’t think it’s all set up right and tough to get communication with the web developer) We’ve mostly been measuring success through her CRM, HubSpot. For the month of February, her HubSpot doesn’t show a single contact having been made(for reference, there were 23 in December with a more limited budget). Finally did more digging tonight and I’m thinking it could be GDPR related. While her ads are only targeting US geos, it looks to me like HubSpots policy is not to place their cookies at all unless you’ve enabled the updated cookie acceptance banner. I can confirm that my client DOES NOT have this banner option turned on. So my my assumption is that her CRM is no longer placing cookies, so even though the ads may have resulted in new contacts, it isn’t crediting them back to the source. Does this seem like it makes sense at all?  

Answer 1

The very first thing I would do is get Google Tag Manager added to the site, even if you have to pay the Devs to do it. That way you can add conversion events that you can send back to Google analytics to in turn bring into Google Ads. If this is not an option, build a landing page specifically for the Google Ads campaign that you can use to test your hypothesis. Hope this helps

Comments

@olivarez GTM is there(and about the only thing I don’t have access into) and conversions are set up, they just don’t seem to be reliably tracking and not sure why. I should clarify that her developer does communicate but seems unwilling to make effort. I was seeing an error in Tag Assistant, his response was “I don’t know how to tag that” - no offer to look into it Either way, I think if her CRM isn’t counting them as a contact, she’ll probably stop running ads as the continued customer journey was the main thing she wanted to be able to track. Anyway, she does actually have a LP in the works because it was the only change I could come up with that may help ‍♀️ I do have an email in to HubSpot in hopes that they can clarify that this may be happening. I do appreciate your help(and reading my super long story/question)  

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@dessalines I hope you get a resolution. I get your frustration as I have been down a similar road very recently. I ended up having to get tough with the website developer by telling them that if they did not co-operate we would take the website off them and call them out on socials. They had their egos bruised once they realised I knew more than them and they couldn't use BS excuses with the client. Good luck, I hope it all works out for you

Answer 2

Get Google analytics ecom tracking setup properly. Pay developers to do it.