Question from Reddit user:
If I have multiple pages that have a ‘get in contact’ form, and they all direct the user to the same ‘/contact/thank-you’ page where the conversion is tracked, is there a way through Google Ads to find out where the user came from? i.e. service page, about us page.
Or do I have to use Google Analytics in conjunction?
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
No, not directly through the standard Google Ads reporting interface, because the conversion tracking script only sees the final /contact/thank-you page and does not inherently know the immediately preceding URL or the sequence of pages visited.
You absolutely must use Google Analytics in conjunction to get the Previous Page Path or create a more advanced solution.
The best solution is to use Google Tag Manager to capture the referrer URL or Previous Page Path and send it as a custom parameter with the conversion event.
The long answer is:
Your goal is to see the exact URL of the page that hosted the ‘get in contact’ form, which is a key piece of data for optimizing your ads.
The Google Ads conversion tag fires when the /contact/thank-you page loads, but by default, it only records that the conversion happened.
It does not look back at the user’s path on your website.
Since all of your conversion pages are the same, Google Ads has no way to differentiate the source page within your site.
The simplest client-side solution is to use Google Tag Manager to capture the referrer information and send it to Google Ads.
In GTM, you can create a custom variable that pulls the full URL of the page the user was just on, which is available in the data layer as the Document Referrer or by capturing the Previous Page Path using a Custom JavaScript variable.
You would then attach this variable as a custom conversion parameter to your Google Ads conversion tag.
You would send the previous page URL under a parameter name like previous_page_url.
Once data is sent this way, you can segment your Google Ads conversion reports by this custom parameter.
For a scalable, resilient, and multi-platform solution, you should leverage the Google Ads API and the Google Analytics Data API with a server-side tagging environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
The core idea is to use GTM to collect the Previous Page Path but send the conversion data server-side.
The server container receives the page_view events, which contain the URL of the page with the form.
When the conversion event is processed, the server container already has the full session path data from the page_view events.
It can then use the Google Ads API to enrich the conversion data with the exact page path and send this granular information back to Google Ads.
The Google Analytics Data API is then used to pull the rich, path-based data from GA4, which inherently tracks the Previous Page Path dimension for events like page_view.
Finally, you would use the Looker Studio API to build a comprehensive dashboard that blends the conversion data from Google Ads (which attributes the cost) with the path data from GA4 (which provides the specific page URL), giving you a single, unified view of cost-per-contact for each contact form page, a level of analysis you cannot achieve in either platform alone.
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