'Chat started' conversion tracking for Google Ads

Community Support
1

Hi everyone,

We started tracking chat submissions as conversions back in January. Initially, we used the default setup recommended by Tawk.to. However, since we usually send the first message to visitors (and many don’t respond), this setup was counting those as “chat started” events, so it wasn’t an accurate reflection of real interactions.

To improve tracking, we tried a few other approaches and eventually found helpful guide on dumbdata.co. We decided to use the event triggered when a message is sent by the visitor as our main conversion indicator. This worked perfectly, until about a month ago.

Now, when a visitor sends a message via the live chat, no event is triggered in Google Tag Manager, so we’re no longer able to track live chats as conversions in Google Ads.

Has anyone else experienced this? Or have any idea what might’ve caused this setup to stop working?

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi Perimeter,

Thank you for posting your concern here.

Not sure why it stopped working.

We’d like to look into this further with you.

Can you please schedule a call with Ceasar so that he can check?
You can use this link: Calendly

3

Thank you. I scheduled a call.

4

That’s frustrating when a reliable setup suddenly stops working.

It sounds like Tawk.to may have recently changed how their front-end JavaScript or the chat widget itself operates, which is a common reason for custom GTM setups based on front-end events to break.

The event listener for the visitor message - Tawk_API.onChatMessageVisitor - might no longer be reliably firing or its timing has shifted, making it unavailable when your GTM tag attempts to listen.

I haven’t experienced this specific issue with Tawk.to recently, but generally, when a front-end event breaks, the most robust and future-proof solution is to shift to a server-side tracking approach.

This involves using the Tawk.to dataLayer events you already have, sending those to a service like Stape or Google Cloud Platform, and then utilizing the Google Ads API to send the conversion data directly to Google Ads.

This is generally a much better long-term solution because it relies on Tawk.to’s own API functions, which are less likely to change or break than trying to trigger off of an element or a subtle front-end event.

You can still use the script you shared to push the events to the dataLayer.

Specifically, you’d configure your GTM to listen for your custom event - tawkto_Interactions - and then send that data to a server container using a service like Stape.

In the server container, you would process the event and then send it to Google Ads using a Google Ads tag with the conversion events you want to track, like the visitor message event.

The benefit of this is that server-side tracking using the Google Ads API is less susceptible to ad blockers and browser limitations like Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP).

Plus, server-side tracking allows you to send events that Google considers Standard Events, such as purchase, lead, or sign_up, which are crucial for effective campaign optimization, instead of solely relying on the non-standard chat started event.

This way, you ensure your tracking is both accurate and resilient against future front-end changes.

5

Hi @Sweely ,

Thanks for raising this. We haven’t made any changes to the Tawk_API events. Could you please share a console log from a session where the visitor message event didn’t fire? That would help us troubleshoot the root cause.

Looking forward to your response.