Track Ad Impressions & Clicks With Google Analytics

Whether you are a developer or running your own business in WordPress, being cognizant of Google Analytics is a skill you cannot neglect. If you run a Google Ads campaign, you are likely to come across plenty of metrics. Right from clicks and conversions to click-through rates, there is a lot to monitor when it comes to evaluating the success or failure of a campaign. 

However, with almost everybody focusing more on results, one important metric that generally gets overlooked is the impression. Each time your ad appears, whether it is showing on Google Display Network, search result page, or somewhere else, it is counted as one impression. 

In simple words, this metric can be considered as a proxy for how many people are looking at your ad. So, if you wish to find out how ad impressions and clicks can be tracked with Google Analytics in WordPress, you have landed on the right page. Let’s find out everything about it in this post.

Google Ad Impressions and Clicks:

Impressions:

An impression gets recorded whenever the ad URL comes up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a viewer. When a page is opened from the search result, the impression gets recorded for the URL to which the snippet was pointing. However, keeping in mind that the URLs in search snippets are neither the full URL nor hyperlinked, Google might not record impressions for the precise URL that is available in the snippet. 

When it is about search elements that comprise multiple links, impressions can be recorded either by the site or the URL, depending on which view is being looked at in the analytics report. When grouped by a page, an impression is counted for each URL that is on the card. On the other hand, when grouped by a site, just one impression is regarded for the entire card. 

Clicks:

In most cases, any click impressions from a SERP that sends a viewer to a page outside of the Google search is regarded as a click. Also, suppose a user has clicked on a link to an outside page. However, if he went back to the search result and clicked on the same link again, it would still be regarded as one click.

Clicks are given to the URL upon which a viewer lands ultimately. Thus, if a page is redirecting to another when clicked, the redirected page gets a click.

Importance of Tracking Google Impressions and Clicks in Analytics

Tracking your ads with Google Analytics lets you combine the data with other equally important metrics and use them comprehensively to optimize your ads and get the most out of them. Moreover, by tracking impressions and clicks in Google Analytics, the pressure of tracking impressions in the local database from your server is taken off; thus, it helps save performance. 

Activating Google Ad Tracking and Integrating

Google Analytics is a platform that provides its users with robust tracking and reporting services. Google Analytics can track unique events, like users’ interaction with your ads, other than just monitoring clicks and views. It will reduce the burden of traffic and storing overload on your site’s database to the Google Analytics platform. Thus we recommend using this platform for a better user experience.

Now, let’s get started with integrating your WordPress plugin with Google Analytics.

In this article, we’ll be using the WP Ad Center – WordPress ads plugin, as we find this being one of the best plugins for managing ads, and it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics.

After installing WP Ad Center, go to Settings > Integration > Google Analytics Authentication Settings.

There are  two methods  you can add integration for Google Analytics on your WPAdCenter Plugin:

• By authenticating GA with WPAdCenter (We recommend going with the first method)
• By Manually entering the UA code (please note that this functionality has limited features; hence, you will be able to send the DATA when a user interacts with the ad to GA but won’t be able to fetch it)

After you click on “Connect WP Ad Center,” an authentication window will open provided by Google, where you will be able to find credentials after you allow sharing of GA data with our Google App.

Next, submit the authorized token from the authentication window, where you can select the respective account and property.

After you have set the profile successfully, the page reloads, and you will be able to see your tracking code which means you have successfully authenticated your GA with WPAdCenter.

Now, you can successfully send and collect data from Google Analytics.

Analyzing Ad Impressions & Clicks

You can easily analyze ad impressions and clicks after integrating your WPAdCenter Plugin with Google analytics.

To access the reports, click on the WPAdCenter option on the left side panel. Next, click on the ‘Custom Report’ tab next to the dashboard.

Select the period by choosing the starting and ending date and click on the type of ad to create custom reports of your ads.

Now, you’ll be able to see detailed reports on views, clicks, and CTR of your ads for the respective dates.

Google Analytics Limits and Quotas

Google Analytics has a limit to the number of events, such as impressions and clicks that you can send. The current limits are as follow:

Metric	Click Limit
Hits per page (page impressions, clicks, and ad impressions)	20 (increases by 2 every second)
Hits per session	500
Hits per property	10 million

Conclusion

While tracking ad impressions and clicks with Google Analytics in WordPress is essential and produces good results, know that it works with old Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4. However, you would only be able to track until your web pages have analytics code. So, make sure you have integrated the code and work with that. Now that you have understood about tracking ad impressions and clicks, get started now.