Google AdWords Conversion Tracking - What You Need To Know

Online advertising is a vital part of generating leads for business. Tracking the effectiveness of this online advertising is also absolutely necessary to ensure that money is not being wasted.

To track how online advertising is working for your business, you can use the cost-free technology provided by Google AdWords. By continuously evaluating how your adverts are performing, you can alter your campaign with the new knowledge you gain to make your campaigns more effective.

How can I narrow down which adverts are working the most effectively?

Google AdWords offers a free tool for AdWords conversion tracking. Conversion tracking illustrates what happens once a lead clicks on one of your advertisements, giving an excellent insight into how to interest is retained once the initial step has been taken. You can track whether a customer followed through on buying a product, giving contact details to sign up for a newsletter, contacted your business with a query or downloaded a free digital product. The activity that takes place on the journey of a customer from seeing your ad to converting to a buying customer is key to effective advertising, making this tool very useful for refining strategy.

You can break down your conversion tracking evaluation into keywords, adverts, ad groups and overall campaigns. Within each, you can track actions taken when a customer engages with ads. These actions include website actions, such as products bought and sign ups to newsletters and accounts. It can also include phone calls made using details on an ad or from clicking on details on the website. It covers app downloads or actions within an app; and “Import”, or actions that start online and continues offline, such as details submitted on the website and later used offline to land a lead.

Using the information generated by the AdWords tracking tool, you can determine which keywords are the most successful for generating interest in your business. The most successful ads can then be replicated or tweaked to include the most effective keywords.

How do I set up and track AdWords conversion tracking?

You will need to add a conversion tracking tag or snippet of code to your website or mobile app. When a customer clicks on one of your ads placed on a Google search results page or an affiliated network site, a cookie is temporarily placed on the device they are using to view the advert. Once the customer completes an action - the one you have decided to track - the conversion is recorded and added to your conversion tracking database.

You can create your tracking for conversion actions in your Google AdWords account, which will set up tracking for the ads you run. You can select a conversion tracking window, which denotes the tracking period after a click occurs.

Once the tracking tool is all set up, you can specify the conversion tracking metrics to follow either all conversions or to count all leads generated by one customer as one conversion. Both can be useful for determining the effectiveness of your advertising for drawing in and retaining customers. You can also track converted clicks, which show you the number of clicks upon an ad that drew in one or more conversions.

Why should I use Google AdWords conversion tracking?

The more information you can garner about the people who are interacting with your advertising, the better the results will be. Not only can you track their behaviour once they click on an advert, you can see which devices they use to access your advertising and how their journey progresses across browsers and devices.

If you are planning to use financial resources on Google advertising, you should be making sure that it is a worthwhile return on investment. You can start out with a more general campaign and slowly target your advertising to really become an effective method of generating leads and product sales. You can also change your bid strategies depending on which adverts are doing well, perhaps saving you money. This is where we can help. Our team of marketing specialists at JDR have solid experience of successfully using Google AdWords to generate leads for our customers in a sustainable and cost-effective way.