Adwords Conversion Tracking

Google provides Adwords Conversion Tracking as a free tool in which you can measure your Google Adwords account’s performance.

How Adwords Conversion Tracking Works

AdWords Conversion Tracking places a cookie on a user’s computer when she clicks on one of your AdWords ads. When this user reaches your conversion page, Google records a successful conversion which will be reflected to the corresponding campaign, ad group, URL and keyword. The cookie on the user’s computer will expire in 30 days.

With Adwords Conversion Tracking, you have the option to track either a purchase (or sale), a lead, a sign-up or a view to a web page.

Set Up Adwords Conversion Tracking

Define an action on the Adwords Conversion Tracking page. You can create up to 30 actions of different categories.

Purchases/Sales

  • Helps online commerce sites track purchases and sales to determine return on investment (ROI).
  • Page that says “Thank you for your purchase.”

Leads

  • Appropriate for sales organizations interested in tracking how many users requested follow-up calls for more information from a member of the sales team.
  • Page that says “Thank you for contacting us.”

Sign-ups

  • Designed for sites interested in tracking sign-up statistics for subscriptions or newsletters.
  • Page that says “Your subscription has been processed.”

Views of a Key Page

  • Helps sites track how many times users have landed on a single page that’s important to your business.
  • Any important page of your website that you want users to view.

Other

  • Tracks a category unique to your service or business.
  • Name your action (e.g. Purchase)
  • Assign a revenue value to your action: You can assign either a fixed value (e.g. USD 20.00, if the value is always a constant) or a dynamic variable (e.g. Total_Cost, if the value is not a constant as with shopping cart)
  • Select conversion page language (e.g. English US)
  • Select conversion page security level (https:// for secure page, http:// for other pages)
  • Choose a text format and background color for your Google Site Stats (for optimal user experience, choose not to show the Google Site Stats text)

You are now given the tracking code snippet.

    Google Adwords Conversion Tracking Code Snippet

Identify the conversion page on your website. It depends on the type of conversion you will need to track, but it is usually the purchased confirmation page or the “thank you” page.

Place the code snippet on your conversion page. The code snippets will have to be placed between the body and /body tags. For optimal user experience, place the code snippet immediately above the /body tag.

Verify the Adwords Conversion Tracking has implemented correctly by either:

  • Waiting for a conversion to occur
  • Completing a test conversion on your website (which will cost you at least an ad click)

For more setup information, download (*.pdf) the Adwords Conversion Tracking Setup Guide.

Review Conversion Reports and Apply Optimization Actions

Review the Adwords Conversion Tracking metrics and apply Adwords optimization tips to your account.

Use Adwords Conversion Optimizer to automate your keyword bidding and optimize your ROI. One of the requirements for using Adwords Conversion Optimizer is that you will have to be concurrently using Adwords Conversion Tracking.

Your Adwords broad match keyword strategies can be optimal by using:

  • Adwords Conversion Tracking: Most of your reports will show conversion statistics columns
  • Adwords Search Query Performance Report: The conversion statistics columns are displayed within this report so that you can identify your negative keywords and new exact match keywords

Stop Adwords Conversion Tracking

If you no longer need Adwords Conversion Tracking, you can simply disable it from the Adwords Conversion Tracking page in your account. If you want to completely remove the conversion statistics columns from your campaign summary tables, you will have to remove the conversion tracking code snippet from all your pages and delete your actions through the Adwords Conversion Tracking page.

Import Google Analytics Goals

Import Google Analytics goal data into your Adwords account:

  • To correlate your Google Analytics data (e.g. goals, transactions and pageviews) with your Adwords ad clicks
  • To enhance the automation and optimization abilities of Adwords Conversion Optimizer

Comments

2 Responses to “Adwords Conversion Tracking”

  1. BJ Wright on September 23rd, 2009 4:20 pm

    Do you know how long it takes for Google AdWords conversion tracker to track a sale? Is it instantly or is there about an hour gap? I know with Google Analytics the reporting is about 4 hours behind, but wasn’t sure with AdWords?

  2. Silvia on October 7th, 2009 12:20 pm

    Hi BJ,

    Yes this is a very big drawback of Google Analytics, it only lets you update the stats once a day. With Adwords it is the same. You should try Logaholic Web Analytics: here you can do live reporting and tracking. Among other tools, the funnel analysis, segmentation and A/B split testing are way easier to set up than in GA. You can download a free trial from here: http://www.logaholic.com/wp/trial-download/

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