New “Conversions (by conv. time)” column in Google Ads

LinkedIn is one of my sources of information when it’s about paid media. I know it’s awkward to keep it open at work as it may seem you’re constantly looking for new jobs but, actually, LinkedIn is great to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest particularly when you don’t work in a paid media team, like myself. It’s my go-to place to spot the latest features release from Google and Facebook as my network is populated by paid media professionals.

And it’s on LinkedIn that this morning I found out about these new columns that were added on Google Ads recently: Conversion by conv. time, Conversion Value by conv. time and Value/conv. by conv. time. As you can see in the screenshot above, the new Conversion by time column will show conversion count based on the day the conversion occurred.

It’s not a huge news, but it’s always nice to see new thing being added and it can be useful particularly for e-commerce and for businesses that have a long time lag between the “last” paid click and the conversion (last click or whatever click the attribution model will give attribute the conversion to).

I remember some years ago I was surprise to see there was a difference between Google Ads conversion count and Analytics count when filling in my monthly reports for an e-commerce client. Then, I found out the answer: Google Ads reports conversions against the date/time of the click that led to the successful action, not against the date of the conversion itself. This is to match the value generated to the right advertising cost, it makes sense but it left a more junior myself a bit baffled. When you deal with big transaction values the difference is considerable and if the client uses Analytics as main data source it looks like you’re messing up with data intentionally if you don’t know the reason why the data between Google Ads and Analytics differ.

On the flip side, this causes your monthly performance to look a lot better when looked at after a few days because the value gets retrospectively attributed to the time of the click. What a frustration to report early in the month for the month just gone and see ROAS increase days after, when your report is already with the client!

I suppose this will help get a bit more consistency between Google Ads and Analytics although I cannot see a direct useful consequence for optimisation.

Well, thanks LinkedIn and my connections to put this under my attention. Have you seen it yet, do you think it’s useful?