The importance of site-wide tagging for accurate conversion measurement

Measurement is foundational to digital marketing. Heading into the holidays, it’s more important than ever to make sure all of your online sales, reservations and leads are measured accurately. To that end, we wanted to bring an important update to your attention: The recent introduction of Intelligent Tracking Prevention affects conversion measurement on Safari. It’s important to update your website tags as soon as possible so that you see all of your conversions from Safari. This is in line with Apple's recommendations for ad attribution. Without updating your tags, it will be difficult to measure the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Site-wide tagging preserves your visibility

There are multiple ways to measure the performance of your online advertising. The best options rely on site-wide tagging -- tagging that’s applied to every page on your site. Applying the tag to every page of your site keeps your measurement updated and helps to measure conversions more accurately, including in Safari's ITP environment. This article includes all of the necessary steps to properly tag your site.

Here are three different options when it comes to measuring conversions:

Option 1: Install the global site tag (gtag.js) on your entire site

We’ve introduced updated conversion tagging via the new AdWords experience: Our new global site tag (gtag.js) will now serve as the single tag for both AdWords and Google Analytics, with support for DoubleClick products coming soon. By setting it on every page of your site, and placing event tags on your active conversion pages, the global site tag will send conversion data whenever event calls are made.

1. Access the global site tag in the Conversions section of AdWords and install it on every page of your site.
2. Place event calls on each of your active conversion pages following the instructions in AdWords.

For step-by-step instructions, check out this Help Center article.

Option 2: Link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts

Consider this approach if you're already using Google Analytics to measure your website engagement. Once you link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts and meet some requirements, your conversions will be measured more accurately. This is true whether you're using the analytics.js tag or the new global site tag, gtag.js, for Google Analytics tagging.

Option 3: Use Google Tag Manager

For customers who are already using Google Tag Manager, there's no need to make any changes to your page -- simply add the conversion linker tag in the Tag Manager interface, and set it to fire on all pages.

If you're not yet using Google Tag Manager, you can get started with the global site tag (Option 1 above) and then easily upgrade to Tag Manager in the future.

If you’re using a non-Google tool for website measurement, check with your vendor to make sure your solution allows you to measure conversions in Safari's ITP environment.

Learn more

Head over to the Help Center for more information about site-wide tagging and conversion measurement. Finally, if you use DoubleClick Search, an update for the floodlight tag will be available in November.

Posted by Wilfred Yeung, Product Manager for Bidding and Conversions