Are your ads working? First, measure correctly.

Conversion tracking setup is the least discussed but most decisive step in digital marketing. A "conversion" here means a visitor doing something valuable for you: submitting a form, tapping your phone number, messaging you on WhatsApp, downloading a proposal document. If you do not count these moments correctly, you cannot know which ad or which page brings in business. Systems like Google Ads and Meta cannot learn what to target either.

First, decide what to measure

Counting every click as a conversion is the most common mistake. Events like "stayed on the page for 30 seconds" or "viewed two pages" are signs of interest, but they do not bring business. If you mark them as conversions, the ad system will send you plenty of visitors who are "interested but never become customers."

For a corporate website, a typical breakdown looks like this:

In GA4 (Google Analytics 4), valuable events are marked as key events; it is usually healthier to pass only the primary ones to Google Ads as conversions.

Form submissions — thank-you page or event?

There are two common methods:

1. Thank-you page: After the form is submitted, the visitor goes to a separate page, and that page loading counts as a conversion. It is simple and reliable. The only caveat is that this page must not be reachable by other routes and must not be indexed by search engines.
2. Event submission: The form says "your message was received" on the same page, and at that moment the site sends an event to the measurement system. Set up correctly, it is the cleanest method.

The method to avoid is counting a click on the "submit" button as a conversion. Someone who leaves a required field blank and presses the button is counted too, and the numbers get inflated. The event must fire at the moment the server actually accepts the form.

Phone and WhatsApp clicks

A large share of mobile visitors call or message directly instead of filling in a form. That is why measuring clicks on tel: and WhatsApp links is essential.

• Every phone number on the site should be a clickable link; a number inside an image cannot be tracked.
• A click is not the same as a real conversation. The person may have canceled the call. So keep phone clicks as a separate conversion and do not mix them with forms.
• For calls from the call extension in an ad, Google Ads can count calls lasting longer than a set duration as conversions. That is a more reliable signal than a click on the site.
• With WhatsApp clicks, you also cannot see whether a message was sent. Having the sales team ask and record "where did this person come from?" brings the numbers closer to reality.

Consent Mode — what happens if consent is not given?

In Türkiye, explicit consent for cookies is covered in detail in the Guide on Cookie Practices published in 2022 by the authority that enforces KVKK (Türkiye's Personal Data Protection Law). Marketing and analytics cookies should not run until the visitor gives consent.

Consent Mode is the mechanism Google offers to comply with this. Put simply, the cookie banner on your site tells Google tags what the visitor chose, and the tags behave accordingly. According to Google's documentation, there are four core signals: ad storage (ad_storage), analytics storage (analytics_storage), user data for advertising (ad_user_data) and ad personalization (ad_personalization).

Consent Mode can be set up in two ways:

• Basic: Google tags do not load at all until consent is given.
• Advanced: Tags load, but without consent they send anonymous signals without writing cookies; Google estimates the gap with modeling.

Which one suits you depends on your legal assessment and risk preference. What matters is that the banner really works: when someone clicks "reject," marketing tags must not fire. Testing this in the browser after setup is essential.

Post-setup checklist

• Has every conversion been tested with a real test submission?
• Is the same form counted twice (both thank-you page and event)?
• Do phone and WhatsApp clicks show up separately?
• When "reject" is chosen in the cookie banner, do ad tags stay silent?
• Is internal traffic (from company employees) filtered out?
• Are the numbers in GA4 and Google Ads roughly consistent with each other?
• Does someone check once a month that tracking still works?

The last item looks trivial, but form tracking that breaks after a site update is one of the most common problems we encounter.

How we do it at Globya

We set up measurement before the ads. We handle the site's forms, phone and WhatsApp links, cookie consent and tag manager together, and verify every conversion with a live test. We can do this work whether or not we built your site. The cookie and privacy notice side is part of our KVKK compliance service; in Globya's work, KVKK requirements are never left out and no extra fee is charged. For how to read the numbers, see our article on GA4 core reports.

Frequently asked questions