Your ad platform says Meta’s clicks are cheaper. But a cheap click that never signs up isn’t a bargain. Cost per click tells you what a visit costs; what you really want to know is what a sign-up costs, campaign by campaign. That takes two datasets side by side: what you spent, and what visitors did once they reached your site. Crunch puts them together and answers in one go.
What you’ll need
- Your site’s events — the record of what each visitor did, sent by the BumbleB tag in Google Tag Manager (on a Shopify store, the BumbleB pixel instead).
- Your ad spend, as an export from Google Ads, Meta or any other platform. Direct ad-platform connectors aren’t available yet, and you don’t need one: the export is all it takes.
- Campaign tags on your ad links, so a visit can be tied back to the campaign that brought it.
Step by step
- Add the tag to your site. Follow Google Tag Manager. Make sure a sign-up sends its own event — Crunch can only count what your site sends.
- Keep
utm_campaignandutm_sourceon your ad links. Most ad platforms add these for you. They’re what tells Crunch which campaign a visitor came from. - Export your spend by day and campaign, and upload the file — see Ad spend without a connector.
- Name the campaign column the same way in both. If the export calls it
campaignand the site calls itutm_campaign, rename one before uploading, so Crunch can line them up. - Pick both datasets in the datasets pill, tell Crunch what it can’t see (below), and ask.
Tell Crunch what it can’t see
Your spend export and your events don’t know about each other, or about how your team talks. Say once, at the start of the conversation:
- Which event is a sign-up (or a lead, or a purchase) — “a sign-up is a form submit on the listings form”.
- How your campaigns are named — “listings-search is our Google campaign, listings-carousel is Meta”.
- Untagged traffic — “a visit with no campaign is organic”.
- Currency, if it isn’t obvious from the export.
How to tell it worked
Before you ask anything, check the connector card in the hub: it shows Active once your domain is verified, and each API key’s Last used date moves when events are getting through. Then, in the chat, your answer should show spend and sign-ups for the same campaigns side by side. If a campaign shows spend but no sign-ups, check it’s spelled the same way in both places.
An example
Two campaigns, the same spend, and a suspicion that the cheap clicks aren’t the good ones.
| You ask | Crunch finds |
|---|---|
| We spent the same on our Google and Meta campaigns. How many sign-ups did each bring in, and what did each sign-up cost? | $12,000 on each. Google brought 960 sign-ups at $12.50 each; Meta brought 480 at $25.00 each — Google is about half the cost per sign-up. |
Same budget, twice the sign-ups. That’s the number to move budget on, and it’s one neither the ad platform nor the site could have given you alone.
Good to know
- No live ad-platform connectors yet. Upload a fresh export when you want newer spend, and ask about it in a new conversation.
- Spend and visits join on the campaign name. A campaign named differently in the two places won’t line up until you rename it or tell Crunch they’re the same.
- Events start on the day your tag goes live. There’s no history before that, so compare spend only for dates your site was sending events.
Heads up: your site only sends events once your domain is verified. Set that up first — see Verify your domain.
Related
- Ad spend without a connector — export and upload your spend.
- Google Tag Manager — send your site’s events.
- Ask one question across two datasets — how datasets line up.