Google Ads happily spends your budget and reports clicks, but clicks don't pay the bills. Without conversion tracking you can't tell which keyword produced the sale, Smart Bidding has nothing to optimise towards, and every campaign decision is a guess. Setting up Google Ads conversion tracking in Joomla means placing a tag on your site and firing an event on your thank-you page, and you don't need a dedicated plugin for that. Hopefully, you don't need an extra plugin. You can add Google Ads conversion tracking to your Joomla site using Tassos Code Snippets.
It is a pair of tags from Google. The Google tag identifies your site to Google Ads, and a conversion event tells Google that a visitor completed an action worth money, such as a purchase, a form submission, or a sign-up.
You need a Google Ads account with at least one conversion action.
- Go to Google Ads and sign in.
- Click Goals → Conversions → Summary, then New conversion action.
- Choose Website, enter your domain, and set up the conversion action you want to measure.
- Choose Install the tag yourself.
- Copy two values: your Conversion ID (looks like AW-123456789) and the Conversion label (a short string shown in the event snippet).
- Install Tassos Code Snippets if it is not installed already.
- Go to Joomla Administrator.
- Open Components → Tassos Code Snippets.
- Click New.
- Give your snippet a descriptive title like "Google Ads Tag".
- Select HTML snippet type.
- Paste the following code, replacing AW-123456789 with your actual Conversion ID (it appears twice):
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=AW-123456789"></script>
<script>
window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
gtag('js', new Date());
gtag('config', 'AW-123456789');
</script>
- Select Site Header as the Insertion Method.
- Publish the snippet. Leave Conditional Logic empty so the tag loads site-wide.
This one must fire only on the page a visitor sees after converting, usually your thank-you or order confirmation page.
- Click New again.
- Give this snippet a title like "Google Ads Conversion - Purchase".
- Select JS snippet type.
- Paste the following code, replacing the Conversion ID and label with your own:
gtag('event', 'conversion', {
'send_to': 'AW-123456789/AbCdEfGhIjKlMnOp',
'value': 99.99,
'currency': 'EUR',
'transaction_id': ''
});
- Select Site Footer as the Insertion Method so the event runs after the Google tag has loaded.
- Open the Conditional Logic tab and restrict the snippet to your thank-you page. This step is not optional, without it the conversion fires on every page and your reporting becomes worthless. Learn more in Using Conditional Logic.
- Publish the snippet.
Congrats! You've successfully added Google Ads conversion tracking to your Joomla site without installing another plugin.
If your thank-you page shows a real order total, output it into the value field instead of the fixed number, and pass the order number as transaction_id so Google can deduplicate repeated page loads.
Install the Google Tag Assistant and browse through a test conversion on your site. Tag Assistant shows the Google tag loading on every page and the conversion event firing once on the thank-you page. In Google Ads, the conversion action status changes from Unverified to Recording conversions after the first real conversion, which can take a few hours. If the event never fires, confirm the Site Footer snippet is published and that its Conditional Logic actually matches your thank-you page URL.
For more information about snippet types and insertion methods, visit our documentation: https://www.tassos.gr/docs/tassos-code-snippets/
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