PPC Advertising – Conversion Tracking with Google Adwords

About Guest Poster, Edward Lewis

Edward is an expert in search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising & online marketing.

PPC Advertising – Conversion Tracking with Google Adwords

PPC advertising is a great way of driving very targeted customers to your website, and the system is fairly straight forward, which means that people can often get a simple account up and running in just a few hours. After the past few Web 2.0 Surgery’s I have spoken to several people about how they could improve the performance of their PPC accounts. One of the main ways this can be done is by using the conversion tracking functionality.

Conversion tracking allows you to measure “conversions”. Simply defined, a conversion is someone completing a measurable (and desired) action when they visit your website, be it a sale, a mailing list sign up, a download or somebody submitting a customer enquiry.

Conversion tracking is an important way to measure your return on investment (ROI). Within your PPC account, conversions are recorded at campaign, ad group, search network, keyphrase and ad variation level.

The process of adding the conversion tracking is fairly pain free. However, depending on the checkout process on your site it may involve some changes to the functionality of your website. The code has to be added at the end of the process – on your conversion page, for example a “confirmation” or “thank you” page. If you use a payment service provider such as Pay Pal or Protx/Sage Pay you must make sure that customers are directed back to your site after completing a purchase.

Google Adwords – Enabling Conversion Tracking

• Login to your Adwords account

• Hover over the “Reports” tab in the main navigation, then select “Conversions”

• Click the create an action button

• Give your action a name and select from the drop down list which type of action you will be recording

Tip: If you are unsure about the “Conversion page security level” select “https://” as this will work with either option – if you wrongly select “http:// ” the conversion tracking will not work.

• Select your preferred conversion actions

• Then click the “Save Action & Get Code” button

You now have two options, either copy and paste the code from the left hand box between the body tags on your conversion page. If you have a web developer you can choose the option on the right, and email the tracking code directly to them.

Once the code is installed on your site, it is a good idea to check that everything is working. Unfortunately, the best way of doing this is by spending some money by clicking on one of your ads and then put a test conversion through your site.

Tip: Pick a keyword with a low cost per click!

You can then login to your adwords account to check that the conversion has been recorded – it should be there within a few hours! If not, double check that the code is inserted on the conversion page and then retest it.

The next posts in this series will cover installing the tracking code from Microsoft Ad Centre and Yahoo Search Marketing. Check back next week!