Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Tips to Track Conversions from Google Adwords

The next step after you've selected your keywords and written a compelling ad is to track your conversions. Any Adwords campaign would not be successful if users do not have the tools for tracking conversions.

You have the option of simply using your landing page hits and number of sales from a link to analyze your conversions. But it's also worth looking at the tools Google provide its Adwords users for acquiring conversion data. Here are some tips and guidelines for using Google's conversion tracking tools.

First, you'll need to embed your conversion link using JavaScript. If you are using a shopping cart or other type of setup where the buyer receives a confirmation as part of their checkout process, your best bet is to use some JavaScript code that gets sent back to the Google Adwords tracker.

This tool allows you to track the ads that clicked through and produced a complete conversion; bear in mind that this tool does not allow you to see the number of visitors to the site. Just place the few lines of code into your website, and then access your conversion tracking reports directly on the 'Campaign Summary' page in the Reports Center of Google Adwords.

Conversion tracking will only produce accurate results if you meet these two conditions: First is that you must be running approved Adwords ads on your site. The second condition is only your conversion page should contain the tracking code.

You can verify if the code is working by completing a complete conversion yourself. If you can find out exactly when a user has clicked on your ad and completed the conversion process, you can review your conversion reports within 24 hours and see the click-through on the report summary. Avoid clicking your own ads, as this is a breach of the Google Adwords terms of service contract.

If you are using PayPal or another payment checkout system, you can still track conversions by setting up your Google Adwrods conversion tracker correctly. All you need to do in this case is set up a conversion confirmation web page within PayPal; you can then insert the Google Adwords JavaScript code directly into the web page. Whenever a customer completes the PayPal or other shopping cart process, you'll have a record of their visit, and, most importantly, the conversion.

Authors Sarah Milstein, J.D. Biersdorfer and Mathew McDonald of the book "Google: The Missing Manual", emphasize the importance of determining your total cost-per-conversion for every campaign at any given time.

This information will let you understand how much it actually costs to generate your sale; you can calculate this by using the free conversion-tracking tools and matching the number of conversions up with the total cost of your campaign for any given period of time. To calculate this, you will need to produce a summary report of keyword purchases at the end of each month and divide the number of conversions by your total costs to run the ad.