GET MORE OUT OF YOUR GOOGLE ADS WITH
OUR PPC CONVERSION TRACKING MINI GUIDE
The Smart Way To Increasing Sales
You almost certainly track your sales and it’s fairly likely that you have a good understanding of your click-through rate from PPC ads. Well done for that but you’re still missing a vital and informative piece of the information jigsaw.
If you haven’t put those two metrics together and understood which of your sales was a direct result of Google Ads paid traffic, there is a distinct possibility that you are overspending in some directions and under spending in others.
PPC conversion tracking puts an end to uncertainty and allows you to directly target your PPC marketing revenue where it matters most.
Are There Alternatives To PPC Conversion Tracking?
In theory you should be able to track sales conversions by surveying your clients and asking how they found you but this doesn’t work for a number of reasons:
- You won’t get enough detail and will lose valuable information
- Clients won’t be able to remember whether they clicked on a paid campaign or on an organic listing
- You won’t be able to track your conversions by a variety of metrics
The good news is that PPC conversion tracking can remove the guesswork and gain you a selection of accurate and actionable metrics. Talking to clients is a great idea but they won’t be able to give you the level of detail that you really need.
What Does Successful Conversion Tracking Look Like?
Perhaps the best way to look at successful PPC tracking is to think about how it could help you to move forward and learn from an unsuccessful ad campaign. If your Search or social ad campaign has resulted in a disappointing PPC conversion rate, you need to be rethinking your tactics and investigating:
- The impact of new ad campaigns
- The set up of more successful ad campaigns
- The cost of each lead
- The profitability of keywords and keyword groups
You won’t be able to accurately do any of this however, if you haven’t got PPC conversion tracking correctly set up.
Can PPC Conversion Tracking Really Help My Business?
Creating and updating ad campaigns takes time and costs money. If you are prepared to invest in a campaign then it makes sense to take steps to monitor its progress. If you are committed to a program of business improvement, you should consider the crucial part PPC conversion tracking could play in the following areas:
- Identifying campaign issues including fraudulent clicks and making appropriate changes
- Analysing the comparative effectiveness of landing and conversion pages
- Investigating return on investment
- Ascertaining your spend per new site visitor
- Testing newly launched ads and assessing their need for adjustment
How Does PPC Conversion Tracking Increase Advertising Profit?
When it comes to conversions, it is the direction visitors take once they have landed on your website that counts. By identifying which aspects of your Google Ads campaign directly relate to profit, you can base future marketing decisions on percentages rather than perceptions.
If you want to pinpoint the source of sales, downloads or registrations, and track the success of each stage of your marketing funnel, you need to correctly implement the pay per click tracking codes that will assess the movement of visitors across your website. This may also include PPC call tracking for phone conversions through the ads.
Where Do I Need To Set Up PPC Conversion Tracking?
The first step before adding PPC conversion tracking to your Google Ads is to give careful consideration to the actions you want your site visitors to take. Once you have decided this, you will know which types of pages you want to track. These might include:
- Sales pages
- Contact forms
- Submission forms
- Event sign ups
- Download requests
In order to avoid information overload and over-dispersal of effort, it is vital at this stage to focus on the key metrics that match your conversion goals. If sales are your current concern, make sure your conversion tracking is set up to give you the information you need.
How Do I Set Up PPC Conversion Tracking?
To save time and manage your PPC conversion tracking more effectively. you might want to defer the whole process to a PPC consultancy who can implement measures according to your overall goals.
However, if you want to set up basic tracking yourself, you can do so by following the simple steps below:
- Access your AdWords account by logging in
- Select ‘conversions’ from the ‘tools’ tab drop down
- Click the big red ‘+ CONVERSION’ button
- Choose your conversion type (usually ‘Website’)
- Enter a conversion action name, for example, ‘eBook download’
- Under ‘Value’, assign a value to your chosen action using the options available
- Under ‘Count’, choose a count type that suits your requirements. For example, this might be ‘Every’ for sales or ‘One’ for sign-up forms
- Under ‘Conversion window’, choose the amount of time for which conversions will be counted following a given click or viewing of your ad
- Set categories, for example time segments, to help you customise your performance data to suit your requirements
- Under ‘Attribution Model’ choose the point at which you want each credit to be assigned, usually following a single or combination of clicks
- Follow instructions to save and customise your conversion tracking tag
It is that this stage that you might need some expert help because your conversion tracking needs to be correctly added to your website. This can either be done via your global site tag or using Javascript.
Accuracy can be further improved by linking your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account.
The opportunities for budget clean up and improved ad results brought by PPC conversion tracking are clear. By accurately monitoring PPC conversion results you can accurately target new ad campaigns, improve results from existing ads and see improved ROI on your marketing investment.
At Flycast Media we specialise in bespoke and focused PPC conversion tracking based on the results of comprehensive PPC auditing. With years of digital experience and understanding, we can help you reap the rewards of digital success and see your business flourish. Get in touch today for a free PPC audit.
And don't forget about landing pages.
Shane McEvoy is a seasoned SEO and inbound marketing expert with nearly 30 years of experience in advertising. He established Flycast Media, a specialist B2B digital agency, and is a published author of two well-received guides while contributing to several industry publications - read his complete profile here.
