6_Blog_Adwords

Conversion Tracking

Well now that I’ve basically talked about how to set up an Adwords campaign and if you have done it correctly you’ll be generating clicks for your site which is a great first step to getting the additional visibility for your company or products. An option you might want to try is to set up conversion tracking.

A conversion for Adwords is essentially anything that you think is relevant for what you are trying to achieve with your site. It could be a sign up with user details, a sale or simply going to a specific page on the site and this will be shown as a counter in Adwords for each time someone clicks on your ad then goes to the specific area of the site. For example in the case of a sale you could track how many people make it through the “thank you page” which is the page that is displayed after you make a purchase which should accurately represent how many transactions have occurred.

Conversion tracking is pretty important if you want to track and report on the efficiency of your advertising and you’ll be able to see how your sales are improving through other means but this way you’ll be able to see how many of them are coming directly from the activity that you are running.

Where to find this

You can find the conversion set up section under the tools menu and by clicking on conversions.

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You then need to click on the red button that says “plus conversion”.

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You then select your source of the conversion that you will be tracking. In most cases it will be a website but you also have the option of choosing an App if you have one available, a phone call if you are using Google forwarding or importing them from another source which can be useful if you want your account to show the number of conversions you are seeing but you will have to do this manually.

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If you clicked on the website option you then are presented with a few options. The first is the name of the conversion which you can simply call sale or sign up if those are the types of conversions you are trying to track.

If you have a specific value to the conversion so for example you have worked out that a sign up can on average generate R10 for your business then you could have this reflected in the campaign as a way to better track your activity however for most cases you can leave this option blank.

Clicking on the count section lets you determine if one user should generate more than one conversion if he converts more than once off the same ad.

The conversion window is by default set to 30 days which means that if a person clicks on your ad and then only converts a few days later then it will still count as a conversion. You can of course increase this to 90 days as a maximum.

The category option has sections for other, purchase, signup, lead or view of a key page and this is simply a way for you to classify the type of conversion you are tracking for reporting purposes.

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The Tracking Code

Once you’ve chosen your options you’ll be given a specific piece of tracking code which will need to be placed on your site on the specific page that you want tracked. It looks something like the below example and once it is in place you should start to see conversions being shown in your normal Adwords activity next to your clicks and impressions.

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Once you’ve completed this set up you’ll be able to really start pushing your campaigns further since you’ll be seeing the added value they are bringing to your business.

Cheers for now

Meyrick

1: An Introduction to Paid Search Traffic and Adwords

2: Adwords Campaigns and Keywords

3: Keywords: Which is the right match type for you?

4: Creative: why this is important?

5: Quality Score – What is it Good for?

6: Google’s tools and what they do

7: How to use Google Analytics

8: Ad Extensions – What are they and what do they do?

9: Optimising Your Campaigns – SQR’s and Insights

10: The Importance of Mobile for Paid Search

11: Re-Marketing Lists for Search Ads

12: What is the Google Display Network

13: The Google Display Network – How to Get Started