Question from Reddit user:
Hi guys! I’m a newbie when it comes to conversion goals and need your help understanding how to do this.
The issue is that I would like to run several google ads — each directing to a different article (webpage) and all of them tracking page views for these different articles.
I created page view conversion goals with google tag manager (i.e. conversion goal of them reaching article A webpage URL). But what if I want to create a different conversion goal for article B (to article B webpage URL) and at the same time, run ads for article C, D and E as well. Each with different webpage URL, budget and schedule.
As of now, I see that there’s only one primary page view conversion goal (which let’s say, I set to article A).
So do I have to run different ads on different days and manually go through the tags? Or is there a way for me to use the “others,” “leads,” or “subscribe” and use them for the other articles?
The client blog does have a lot of different articles to promote (2-3 articles/week) so there’s a high turnover when it comes to this.
Any help from you guys would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Answer from Nabil:
The short answer is:
You absolutely do not need to manually change your conversion goal or rely on a single primary goal for all articles.
The simplest and most scalable solution is to set up a single generic Page View event in Google Tag Manager (GTM) that includes the Page URL as an event parameter, and then, inside Google Analytics 4 (GA4), create multiple, distinct conversion events based on that page_view event’s URL parameter.
Once these multiple conversion events are created in GA4, you import all of them into Google Ads, which will allow you to select the specific article’s conversion action (e.g., article_a_view, article_b_view, etc.) as the goal for the corresponding ad campaign, all while keeping the fundamental tracking simple.
The long answer is:
The confusion you’re running into is a common one when moving between the older Google Ads conversion philosophy and the modern, event-driven model of GA4.
Your client’s high turnover of articles (2-3 new articles per week) makes manual setup or reliance on a single goal completely impractical.
Here is the in-depth solution that uses the standard toolset.
First, in Google Tag Manager, you don’t need to create a new tag for every article.
The standard GA4 Configuration Tag automatically tracks the page_view event.
You just need to ensure that the Page URL is being captured as an event parameter, which it is by default.
Next, and this is the crucial step, you go into the Google Analytics 4 (GA4) interface.
For each article you want to track as a conversion, you create a new Custom Event.
You don’t need to write code for this.
You use the Events and then Create Event section in GA4’s Admin panel.
For Article A, you create a new event, perhaps named article_a_view, with the condition that event_name equals page_view AND page_location equals your specific Article A URL.
You then mark this newly created article_a_view as a Conversion.
You repeat this process for Article B (creating article_b_view), Article C, and so on.
Since you have a high volume, you could even make a single generic conversion event, like article_view, and pass the Page Title or Page URL as a parameter to the conversion, which you could then use for segmentation in your reports.
Finally, you go into Google Ads.
Under Conversions, you can now import all of these distinct article_a_view, article_b_view, etc., conversion actions from your GA4 property.
Each imported action will be treated as its own conversion goal in Google Ads.
When you set up the campaign for Article A, you set its campaign goal to specifically use the imported article_a_view conversion.
When you set up the campaign for Article B, you set its goal to use the imported article_b_view conversion.
This allows you to have multiple, campaign-specific conversion goals all based on one efficient GTM setup.
For maximum scalability and to manage budget and schedule without any manual interaction, you can utilize the Google Ads API in conjunction with a server-side environment like Stape or Google Cloud Platform.
While this might be overkill for just setting goals, if you later need to automatically pause low-performing articles or dynamically create new ads and campaigns whenever a new article is published, the Google Ads API allows you to programmatically manage campaign goals, budgets, and schedules for those distinct conversion actions, automating your entire publication and promotion cycle.
This turns a high-turnover manual task into a scalable, automated solution.
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