Hey I am trying to set up conversion tracking with google ads.
I need to follow the steps below:
1. Install the event snippet on the conversion page. This is the page your customers reach on your website after they’ve completed a conversion – the “Thank you for your order” page, for example.
** 1. Open the HTML for the conversion page.**
** 2. Copy the snippet below and paste it between the head tags ( <head></head> ) of the page, right after the global site tag.**
** 3. Save the changes on your web page.**
However, the issue is there is no page reached by a user on a successful sign up. So where do I put this code?
I am trying to track conversions which are newsletter sign ups in my case.
You can create a welcome page in Ghost, and then paste your tracking snippet in the code injection on that page :)
Thanks for the response, Kym!
This makes sense for general conversion tracking - but is there a way to track the conversion amount? i.e. the membership tiers are different prices as are monthly vs yearly payments.
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Each tier can have a different welcome page.
Question, if I have conversion tracking for sub purchases from running social media ads, how can I tell if the purchaser came from ads vs organic or other means because we can only have 1 thank you page for subscriptions and if I had a conversion or purchase event set up on the thank you page it would trigger for all purchases regardless of where the traffic came from wouldn’t it? It would feed pixels incorrect data because even organic would cause it to trigger. I have many traffic streams so I am trying to figure out how to get pixels to only fire if it came from that social netwok?
I am good at most things but not this. Would I need to use tag manager and tell it to only trigger based on it coming from a specific referral domain?
Did you happen to figure out this?
I did. What you need to do is use Google Tag Manager, and set up a custom tag with the conversion tracking pixel set to fire based on the referral domain.
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There may be better ways to do this, but having it set to “Only Fire” if Referral Domain Contains or Does Not Contain (insert domain or domains).
This is what I did, but I have not found a way to separate monthly vs yearly paid members for tracking because there is only 1 thank you page for both monthly and yearly. Hope that helps.
It sounds like you’ve been working through some tricky conversion tracking scenarios.
You’re right that using Google Tag Manager (GTM) with a referral domain trigger is a solid way to isolate traffic from a specific social network for your pixels, especially when you have a single thank you page.
That’s a great initial solution!
The challenge of separating monthly versus yearly paid members with a single thank you page is a common hurdle, but there are more advanced, server-side approaches that can handle this and even let you send the conversion value to Google Ads.
A really powerful and modern way to track these different membership tiers and their values is by implementing server-side tracking, using something like Ghost’s RESTful Content API, the Google Ads API, GTM, and a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
The key here is moving the conversion event logic off the thank you page itself and onto your server, where you have access to the actual payment details.
Here’s how this combination provides a superior solution:
When a user successfully subscribes, instead of just loading the thank you page and relying on a pageview-based trigger, your Ghost platform’s API can be used to capture the details of the purchase, including the exact price and whether it was monthly or yearly.
This information can then be securely sent to your server-side environment (Stape or Google Cloud Platform).
GTM is still useful, but primarily as a container for client-side events that help enrich the server-side data, like a user’s GCLID (Google Click ID) which is essential for connecting the conversion back to the original Google ad click.
Once the data is on your server (the server-side GTM container), you can use the Google Ads API to send a server-to-server conversion event.
This method bypasses the limitations of a single thank you page because the conversion is recorded based on the definitive, internal purchase confirmation from Ghost, not just a page load.
You can fire two different conversion events, perhaps one for a monthly_purchase and one for yearly_purchase, and each event can include the correct, distinct conversion value.
This is much more robust than the client-side pixel because it’s less affected by ad blockers or browser privacy features.
You can use standard events like purchase or custom events, ensuring accurate reporting in Google Ads for both the conversion count and the exact revenue generated from your different tiers.
This architecture offers the highest level of data accuracy, allowing you to optimize your Google Ads bids based on the true value of the conversions, not just the number of sign-ups.
It’s an investment in setup, but it completely solves the problem of tracking variable pricing with a single thank you page and improves the reliability of your data.