Google PPC & Conversion Tracking

Those who are involved with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, will already know what I’m talking about here when I say ‘Conversion Tracking’, but for those of you who don’t know, it’s the where you place a bit of code provided from adwords & and place it where your customer would convert (ie a thank you page of an enquiry form. This can also be combined with a google analytics account too, for more indepth data.

2 Sides of the Coin

The Good Side

We who are managing the pay per click, can now see how well campaigns are doing with some accurracy, it’s no longer guess work, just hoping that the number of clicks on your campaign was enough, now it’s more than that, we have conversion statistics!

What we can now do is increase campaigns which are performing well, perhaps increase their bids to go for a slightly higher position, or increase the time of day they appear, or even increase the bid at certain times of the day, the possiblities are ‘endless’. Though this is highlighting our already ourstanding work (if there is any), it will also highlight two more things. A) Camapigns & adgroups which appeared to be doing well, or thought to be doing well due to high click-through-rates & low costs - but poor conversions B) Campaigns & adgroups which are not performing very well at all. A lot of it, we will already know, but we can also tweak these poor peforming adgroups & campaigns by at worst, turning them off (this isn’t always the best course of action), lowering the bids, turning off low performing keywords in a group,  adding keywords or variations to prop it up - but the important thing is to test, sometimes an effectively written relvant advert is all that is required.

The Bad Side

New websites, landing pages, domains, tend to start off costly, and can often put people off PPC. However the key is to persevere, the prices do come down - Google has to maintain a level of quality control to it’s users, if you have a crap site or crap unrelevant campaign, thats the last thing Google wants, because people would stop clicking adverts. This brings me to my next point, if you have conversion tracking turned on, but not implemented - Google won’t be able to see any conversions, and thus won’t want to show your ad often, and will peanlize you on price, after all, even if you are getting conversions they don’t know it - be sure if you are using it, get it on line quickly. This can especially boost new campaigns, if you have high conversions, Google can see your customers are happy, and will show your advert more frequently, and lower your bid, after all your targeted, relevant.

Hope you found this article useful.

Wuup Team

Related Wuup Stuff:

• 19 July, 2008 -- Use Google Adwords Locality
• 16 July, 2008 -- Yahoo PPC in the Dark Age
• 13 July, 2008 -- Google Adwords Tool Upgraded
• 6 July, 2008 -- Google & Your Data
• 18 December, 2008 -- Psychological Design - Have a go!