Measuring conversion in Google AdWords
In the early days of Google AdWords, businesses were limited in how they could measure conversion, and what was often lost was a buyer’s natural behavior of beginning the process in one spot and finalizing it elsewhere, which Google says they have now updated and will even soon help measure conversion when shoppers physically enter a store or office location. Genius.
To use Conversion Tracking, a website uses a small bit of tracking code, and it places a cookie on a user’s computer or smartphone when they click your Google ad, which now tracks between devices. Google explains more about conversion tracking on their site, but we’ll explain a bit below.
How does Google AdWords work?
An AdWords conversion occurs when someone clicks on your ad and performs a behavior on your website that you recognize as valuable, such as calling your business from a mobile phone or making a purchase on your website. When you use AdWords to increase conversions or sales, keep track of your conversions with a free tool called Conversion Tracking. That way, you can keep an eye on important statistics like cost-per-conversion and conversion rate that tell you how successful your ad campaign is.
There are a variety of things Google measures for AdWords users:
- Number of conversions and cost-per-conversion: You can assign monetary values to your conversions when setting up tracking to get detailed revenue information in your reports. Reviewing your total number of conversions and the value of these conversions can help you decide if you should increase your budget or make changes to your ad groups to attract more targeted visitors.
- Conversion rate: This helps you track how many clicks lead to valuable actions like a sale or signup. The conversion rate listed in your account is the number of conversions divided by the number of ad clicks. Conversions are only counted on Google and our Google Network partners. The conversion rate is adjusted to reflect only the ad clicks on which we can track conversions.
- Keyword conversion data: Conversion Tracking shows you what happens after a customer clicks on your ad — whether he purchased your product or signed up for your newsletter. By knowing this, you’ll also know which keywords are best at encouraging customers to take those actions. Then you can improve your keyword list based on your findings, and make smarter investments in your best keywords.
- See how customers interact with your ads across devices: Sometimes your customers click on your ad on one device, and then make their purchase on another device. These are called cross-device conversions, and you can see them in the Estimated Total Conversions column in your AdWords account.
- Destination URLs: You can see which destination URLs are leading to the most conversions on the Dimensions tab of your account. Just click the View button, then select “Destination URL” from the drop-down, and make sure you’ve added the conversion columns to your data table.
