What is the ‘Anti-Conversion’ and why you need one?
Every day you learn something new. This genious idea comes from Jérémie at IOQuery. Jérémie is one of the top Google Ads specialists out there. Let me know if you’d like a referral (or would even like to hire us both together).
Types of Conversions
We can split conversions into three rough categories:
1) Online Conversions — Someone submits your lead form
2) Offline Conversions — 3 weeks later, someone who submitted the form turns to a qualified lead or even becomes an actual paying customer.
3) The Anti-Conversion — The opposite of a qualified lead. A bot spammed your lead form, someone from around the world or tried to sell you something, or asked you for a job. Garbage leads. You want as few of these as possible.
So, in a sense, the anti-conversion is an (Google Ads) offline conversion, but its purpose is to mark the campaigns, the search terms, the keywords that result in unwanted conversions. Ones where you definitely don't want to pay for the clicks, or even want them to find you at all.
For a truly professional lead generation campaign in Google Ads, we absolutely need offline conversion tracking. Depending on the numbers and the ratios, we want to make sure Google Ads knows which clicks resulted in actual buying customers, or if there are not enough to feed signal for the algorithm to learn a pattern, we want to at least mark the qualified leads as offline conversions. We want to be ‘as close to the money’ as possible, so the algorithm can find us paying customers, not just maximum number of crappy leads or form submissions that don’t go anywhere.
With our micro conversions, online conversions and offline conversions, the most effective strategy is often to use Maximize Conversion Value and allocate values to the each step of the funnel. Similar as e-commerce store may do add to cart, proceed to checkout, and purchase.
The anti-conversion is simply the opposite of a qualified lead offline conversion. I will dig deeper into how to practically use this for maximise ad performance, but I already find the idea by itself absolutely genious.
The way to do this is you will create a secondary conversion in Google Ads and call it something like bad unwanted leads anti-conversion. Make sure to set it up as secondary, not primary conversion (!). This is definitely something we only want to observe and do not want the bidding to optimize towards.
You will need to set up offline conversion tracking using one of the two methods. I'll briefly go through them below. But usually you will need to store the Google Click ID in your contact form or CRM. Then once you see that a specific lead is unwanted, you will send an offline conversion to mark the anti-conversion and try to find patterns which ads, which keywords, which campaigns or target audiences result in these unwanted leads.
Google Ads Offline Conversion Tracking Methods
I will need to create a second blog post and most likely a longer video because the topic of offlien conversions is as complicated as it is interesting. It is one of the ‘secrets’ that the top pros use that simply makes businesses more money than almost nothing else.
For Google Ads offline conversions, there are two methods:
1) Enhanced conversions for leads
2) Offline conversions using Google Click ID (GCLID)
I recently ran an A/B test to compare the methods, and was surprised to see that the ‘classic’ gclid method is by far superior compared to the new enhanced conversions for leads, although that’s what Google recommends.
While it is possible to create fancy automated setups, for example, do offline conversion tracking via the HubSpot lifecycle stages or stuff like that, in practice, most of the time, quick and dirty method is more practical. Just a simple Google Sheet where the good leads, the bad leads qualified and converted leads are marked using a little drop-down.
Perhaps in the future we would be able to allocate a negative conversion value for a conversion to train the algorithm to avoid specific types of leads. Meanwhile we will send offline conversions and anti-conversions and have the maximum data points to understand what works and what is counterproductive.
Removing online conversions?
One thing that I’ve implemented for clients is a conversion tracking setup that manually or automatically deletes online conversions.
The key idea is this: when we get, let's say, an appointment for a massage therapist via their online scheduling system like Breely or Acuity Scheduling, we send a conversion to Google Ads. Now we can see where this conversion came from and Google Ads can optimize to find more similar types of clicks. Great!
But if this customer then decides to cancel their appointment and they don't book another one, one could argue that this was a pretty trash conversion.
If we leave the online conversion in our Google Ads, the algorithm will try to optimize to get more similar people to our website. If we get someone who cancels, it’s in a way as useless as someone who never converted.
If a conversion for whatever reason is the opposite of the type of customer we want to find more of, we have the option to both:
Mark the anti-conversion, secondary offline conversion, to see where they came from
We can also remove the online conversions to nudge the algorithm to skip these types of unwanted customers by using the Google Ads API and removing the online conversion itself.
While this is a setup I've implemented for some clients who have higher cancellation rates, it needs a bit more research to figure out when this makes sense and when it doesn't. If someone cancels a massage because their leg got broken, they still would have been the ideal type of lead. However, e.g. some hotel chains, for example, remove conversions for cancelled hotel bookings. So the strategy to remove online conversions definitely makes sense in some cases.