Do I Need Click-based Conversion Tracking?

• Ad Grants
• News
• Services
• 12. 12. 2025

When running campaigns under Google Ad Grants, conversion tracking isn’t just a “nice to have”, it’s a critical component for compliance, performance measurement, and effective optimization. Yet many nonprofits stick with the minimum (engagement-based) setup. In this article, we explain why investing in click-based conversion tracking can substantially increase the impact of your campaigns, and how it helps you get the most out of your grant budget.

Why Conversion Tracking Matters In The First Place

Conversion tracking tells Google what actions on your website actually matter to you. Without it:

• You can’t accurately measure success.
• You’re missing out on the benefits of Google’s automated bidding strategies.
• You can’t accurately optimize and scale your campaigns.
• Your account may fall out of Google Ad Grants compliance.

In other words, conversion tracking helps you understand how you turn clicks into meaningful outcomes like donations, signups, downloads, volunteers, and more.

The Two Types Of Conversion Tracking

There are two main ways of how we set up conversion tracking:

1. Basic Conversion Tracking (or as we like to call it “Compliance-Only Setup”)

This setup tracks engagement-based actions, such as:

• Session duration longer than 1 minute
• More than 2 pages visited per session
• A video view
• A long website scroll

These conversions are created directly in your analytics platform (typically Google Analytics) and fulfill the minimum Google Ad Grants compliance requirement.

Pros:

• Meets program requirements
• Included in our standard campaign management
• Provides baseline data for bidding algorithms to work properly

Cons:

• Does not track click-based user actions like donations, form submissions, button clicks, newsletter signups, file downloads and similar

(The image above illustrates the full range of conversion actions we track on one of our clients’ websites.)

• Provides very little to no insight into the actual mission impact
• Gives Google’s algorithms very weak data to optimize with
• Provides no conversion value data needed to calculate the ROI of your marketing investment

This setup is enough to stay compliant, but not enough to grow via systemic data-driven campaign optimization. The campaign evaluation and reporting potential is also limited.

2. Advanced (Click-based) Conversion Tracking Setup

Here’s the reality:

Without meaningful conversion data, you cannot optimize your campaigns properly.

You may be using automated bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions, but if the only “conversion” Google sees is time on site, it has no idea who is actually donating, signing up, or taking valuable action.

Advanced conversion tracking allows you to:

• Optimize campaigns toward real goals
• Spend your grant more efficiently
• Identify which campaigns, keywords and ads drive results
• Improve donation and signup rates
• Clearly justify your ad investment
• Train Google’s algorithms to find the right supporters

Most importantly, advanced conversion tracking allows you to evaluate the financial return of your campaigns and optimize them towards the highest return on investment.

Over time, clients with advanced tracking:

• Use more of their monthly grant
• Achieve stronger performance
• Gain clearer insight into what truly works

The Bottom Line

• Basic conversion tracking = compliance only
• Advanced conversion tracking = real performance, optimization, and growth

If your goal is simply to stay compliant, the basic setup will do its job.

But if your goal is to:

• Improve results
• Maximize grant utilization
• Justify your investment
• And actually grow your impact

Advanced conversion tracking is not just recommended, it’s essential.

Pricing

Basic conversion tracking is included in our Ad Grants management fee and we do not charge anything extra for it.

Advanced conversion tracking typically requires implementation and configuration of Google Tag Manager, extensive testing and troubleshooting. Due to a potentially significant workload (that may vary greatly from one organization to another), we cannot include this service in our standard Google Ad Grants management fee. We discuss the current analytics situation individually with each client, then estimate the workload and the total fee. Our rates for all services can be found here.

We typically configure conversions within Google Analytics, which means that this setup can be used to track conversions from all traffic sources, not just from Google Ads.

Final Thoughts

Running Ad Grants campaigns without advanced conversion tracking is like driving with your headlights off at night. You might still move forward and know the approximate direction, but you won’t truly know where you’re going, or how fast you could get there.

It takes time and effort to track all click-based actions on the website but this initial investment pays off quickly via increased campaign performance, data-driven optimization and complete evaluation/reporting possibilities.

If you’d like to get help deciding which conversions make sense for your organization or want support with implementation, our team is always here to guide you.