Conversion Tracking: Everything you need to know
So you have been advertising with Adwords and your click through rate is good, well let me congratulate you on that. That on its own is a great achievement!
Now the golden question is, do you know where your traffic is coming from? Which ad is generating more money? Well I would say if you don’t know the answer to this question it means its time to set up conversion tracking!
With Adwords conversion tracking you are able to see how effective your advertising efforts are and what is generating you more sales.
Conversion tracking is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to see what happens after a customer clicks on your ad.
It tracks whether they have gone and purchased your products, signed up to your newsletters, called one of your offices or downloaded your guides.
Why should I use conversion tracking?
With conversion tracking you can find out which keywords, ads, ad groups or campaigns are doing best and which are driving more traffic.
You will also be able to understand where your ROI is coming from and allow you to make better informed decisions about your expenditure.
How does it work?
Conversion Tracking starts once you have created an Adwords account. Depending on the type of conversion that you are tracking, the setup process will be different. So before you can crack on with tracking, you must decide which conversion source you want to go ahead with.
You are able to track the following:
Website visits
Specific Page Visits
Purchases
Phone calls
Sign-ups
Downloads
Link Clicks
How is this done?
In order to track your results, you will have to add a snippet of code to your website.
In return this code will place a temporary cookie on the visitor’s computer as soon as they click on your ad and once they complete the action you want them to take, the system recognises the cookie and records the conversion.
Metrics
There are two main ways of counting conversions; conversions and converted clicks. Both can be obtained on the tracking reports within Google Analytics.
Conversions:
It is only considered one converted click even when the same person generates multiple purchases.
Converted clicks:
This is where from one ad click you have generated one or more sales.
Top tip: If you want to track multiple kinds of conversions then just set up different conversion actions for each type of conversion that you would like to track.
It is also possible to track multiple conversions based on source.
Now that you have the basics of tracking, I strongly advise you to go have a look at your conversion tracking metrics and see how your ads are doing.
Creating the Conversion Tracking Code
Log in to your Google Adwords account. …
Go to Tools › Conversions, and click + Conversion.
Enter a name in the Conversion name field. I would recommend ‘Sale’, ‘Lead’ or ‘Signup’
Click Save and continue.
Use the following settings:
Click Save and continue.
Click ‘I make changes to the code’, then copy the code that displays.
Paste code into your order complete or Thank You page. I’d recommend adding the conversion value.
Advanced Strategy Note
As a side note I have seen clients in the US use conversions as a method to lower costs and increase quality score. It is a complex subject but Google has to make a judgement as to the best advertiser. Logically the more conversions you have the better you are helping customers. Therefore Google rewards high converting sites with a better quality score. If you have a situation where you are not recording sales as conversions then you can explore other measures.
Selecting time on site as a conversion measure might be an option. Effectively if some one spends 1 minute on your site then they must have a greater interest in your site and hence are more likely to purchase. Using this measure as a goal increases conversions dramatically and hence affects your quality score – Google will deny this, but trust me. You can now reduce costs using negatives against high cost converting terms by selecting to deploy funds against high cost conversion or cheap conversions. Why pay £10 per conversion when you could get 20 conversions at £0.50?
