Why you should use AdWords conversion tracking

Why you should use AdWords conversion tracking and how to get

started in 30 minutes or less!

http://www.panasianventures.com

January, 2013 +63 2 625 0190 [email protected]

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If you’re not using conversion tracking with your AdWords campaigns please read the following – it’s truly an Internet marketing best practice to do so and costs you nothing but a few minutes to set it up!

Please call or email if you need assistance with this process, which we will usually provide at no charge (depending on the complexity of your website).

Conversion Tracking is accomplished by placing a small piece of code in your ad, landing page or “thank you” page to record the movements and actions of your visitors. The recorded data can be used to find out what aspects of your advertising and website design are working and what ones aren't. Tracking allows you to test multiple ads, keywords, landing pages and offers, and compare the results.

Why Bother?

Why should you bother with tracking? Because simply knowing how many leads you are getting or sales you are making isn't enough.

If you are spending a lot of money on a particular pay-‐per-‐click campaign or you've spent quite a few hours setting up what you hope is a killer email blast, then it's nothing less than basic business sense to use some sort of tracking to find out whether that time and money is paying off.

Let's say you start promoting a learn guitar product like Jamorama. After about a month, you can see that you are making, on average, 10 sales a day. If you are making a profit, that's good -‐ but what if you're not? At this point, you have no idea whether that's because your pay-‐per-‐click ads aren't very good, whether your landing page is putting people off, or whether you are spending too much promoting the wrong keywords!

On the other hand, let's say you are making a profit. In this case, tracking might not seem so critical — but consider how much more profit you could get if you found that, for example, your pay-‐per-‐click ad for the keyword 'learn how to play bass guitar' was getting twice as many conversions as your ad for the keyword 'how to play acoustic guitar'. You could then reduce your spend on the 'acoustic guitar' ad, and increase your return on investment!


How Tracking Helps You Make More Money

At the most basic level, tracking helps you find out your return on investment and where money is best spent.

• It helps you discover what keywords, ad groups and campaigns are most profitable. • It allows you to test new ads and conversion pages more effectively and more quickly. • It lets you find out how much each visitor is costing you. • It helps you discover any leaks in your landing page or website.

Pay-‐per-‐Click Tracking

Google allows you to place their conversion tracking codes on your "thank you" pages so that you can see how many sales resulted from each ad group, and how much each sale cost you.

Let's take a look at Google:

Setting up Google tracking is very simple and involves placing a small piece of code on the conversion page of your website or the website of the merchant. The conversion page is the page that confirms the particular action you wanted your visitors to take, such as the page that says 'thank you for purchasing X software' or 'thank you for signing up to my email list'.

Remember that tracking isn't restricted to sales. AdWords tracking lets you follow leads, signups, page views of an important page on your website or any other detail specific to your business.

To get started, log in to your Google AdWords account and click the Conversions option under the Tools and Analysis tab at the top of the page.


Choose the conversion type you wish to track which, for most people will be purchase or lead.

If at all possible, assign a value to the conversion based on your estimate or actual knowledge of what the action is worth. This will provide important ROI information when you are evaluating your campaigns. If the conversion results in a lead, you should have some idea of what a lead is worth to your business based on the average number of leads that ultimately result in sales, or based on the cost of a lead attained through other means. (If you’re selling multiple products, see the last section on dynamic CPV tracking.)

The next step is recommended but optional. Select the text format that best fits in with your website and choose the background color for the ‘Site Stats’ notification. This small piece of text will be visible to your customers, as Google believes people should be aware that their movements are being tracked!

Next, select the language and security level.


Grab the tracking code by copying it to your clipboard.

You should put this code on the page that appears after your visitor has carried out the action you want them to do. If you wish to track sales, then you will need to paste your Google AdWords code into the "thank you" page after the shopping cart checkout process. If you are collecting leads or signups, the “thank you” page is what appears after the user clicks the ‘Submit’ button.

As you start to gather clicks and sales, you'll be able to see some new details appearing in your Google account: cost, conversion rate, cost per conversion and conversions. You can drill down to view this data at either the ad group or keyword level.

To find your return on investment for keywords or campaigns, go to the Campaigns tab and run a keyword performance or campaign report.


Additional information if you are doing online selling

If you are selling products or services on your website we also recommend that you use dynamic value tracking in your conversion tracking which will help you calculate CPV (cost per value) and optimize the campaign for a better CPV in future. This is because being an ecommerce website, assuming you sell multiple items, your subtotals and cart values will change constantly. Only a slight modification in your conversion tracking code, which we can help your web developer understand and implement, can bring you a wealth of information on how your revenue is being driven by what keywords throughout the online sales process.

Since you will be able to retrieve cost per value, you will know the value of conversions that each keyword drives and then invest budget in the keywords accordingly based on that knowledge. Some keywords might be driving conversions that are worth 10 times more in value than other keywords, so it would be smart to bid higher for those keywords. You want to pay more per click for keywords that drive conversions with higher values.

Enabling dynamic value tracking is not difficult. You’ll see in the illustration below how it’s set up in the AdWords conversion tracking menu.

The red arrow is pointing to a question mark which links to a help page. This page explains the differences in conversion value tracking depending on whether your website is using Active Server Pages, Java Server Pages, or PHP and will provide a code snippet for your use on the ‘results page’ in each case. Further instructions here tell you what to do if your site has web pages with frames, and if your pages are using secure or non-‐secure protocols. The green arrow on the screen shot shows the variable ‘value’ string that will be passed back to AdWords conversion tracking – in this example it’s the ASP version.

With value tracking set up and working properly on your website you will be able to add columns to your AdWords reports such as:

Total conversion value

Conversion value / cost

Conversion value / click

Value / conversion (1-‐per-‐click or many-‐per-‐click)


Good luck implementing and using conversion tracking on your website. We are confident that you’ll find it very useful in maximizing the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaigns.

The basic format and some of the content herein are from the website http://www.afiliorama.com

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Why you should use AdWords conversion tracking