At the time of writing Google has no way of tracking WhatsApp leads as conversions. You can track the click on your WhatsApp button as a conversion but that's not very useful because:-
I hope Google eventually offers conversion tracking for WhatsApp so we can:-
Without this you don't know if you're actually getting real value from your ad spend and optimising campaigns is guesswork.
I've used a couple of work arounds to track WhatsApp leads as conversions in Google Ads.
The first was with a third-party tracking service. It was expensive to integrate and came with a hefty monthly bill. But it made sense for the client because they get thousands of leads every month. They needed something automatic to handle the volume.
The second takes some manual work.
It's a good fit if you're getting a couple of hundred (or fewer) leads a month and can't justify the expense of a fully-automatic solution.
I've used it for a handful of clients with great results. Before we did this they were flying blind. Now they know that their Google Ads delivers good quality leads. And we're starting to optimise for better quality leads using offline conversions. They're also confident that their new Facebook and TikTok ads are making money.
I've extracted the solution I into a service that anyone can use. Here's how it works.
Let me show you.
Go to https://pete-bowen.com/contact and click on the WhatsApp button. You'll see an opening message with the reference number.
The main weakness with this approach is that the visitor could delete the reference number before sending the message. This does happen every now and again. But, we get enough useful data from the 99% who include the reference to make it worth doing.
If you're paying for ads and have a WhatsApp button on your website you're welcome to use my system.
Setting it up is a copy+paste job we can do together on Zoom. It shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
After that you'll know where your WhatsApp leads are coming from, and you'll be getting useful data about what's working in your ad account. Use this and you can optimise your ads for more and better quality leads.
The system is available at Convertista.com.
I offer 1-to-1 mentoring and consulting. You’ll get help, advice, support and answers without having to commit to a long-term contract. Details here.
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