5 Reasons Why Conversion Tracking is Critical to the Success of your AdWords Campaigns

If you’re managing a Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and NOT using Conversion Tracking, you’re missing out on a wealth of information that can give you valuable insights into the health of your campaign. When clients seek our help with managing their PPC campaigns, we’re usually shocked to discover that they’re not already taking advantage of AdWords’ free conversion tracking tool.

With conversion tracking enabled, AdWords serves a small cookie to a visitor’s computer or mobile device at the time they click on your ad, which tracks their actions on your website. If a visitor ultimately makes a purchase or signs up for an account (or takes whatever action you’re hoping they’ll take), then their visit is counted as a conversion for your campaign. (More information about how to properly set up AdWords conversion tracking can be found here.)

While it may be true that AdWords gives you a lot of helpful performance data about your PPC campaign by default—impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate, etc.— what it doesn’t tell you is what happens after a visitor clicks on your ad. In other words, what are the specific factors that cause visitors to convert? That type of information is only possible through the addition of conversion tracking.

Here are five reasons why tracking conversions is critical to the success of your Google AdWords campaign:

Conversion tracking helps you…

1. Optimize your AdWords campaign more effectively.

If you’re not tracking conversions, you won’t know how well your campaign is working. Sure, you may be seeing a lot of clicks on your ads, but how many of those clicks are actually leading to conversions? If you don’t know which of the many moving parts aren’t working well, you won’t be able to optimize the campaign to its fullest potential and improve the results you’re getting.

2. Spend your ad dollars more efficiently.

If you don’t track conversions, you won’t know how to spend your budget in order to maximize profit. For instance, should more budget be put toward certain keywords and ad placements? How about less budget toward underperforming keywords? By seeing how your conversions are aligned with ad groups and at the granular keyword level, you’ll know where you should focus more of your budget, and where you should trim the fat.

3. Know where your most valuable visitors come from and what motivates them.

Not tracking conversions means not knowing where your most valuable visitors—the ones who convert—are coming from and which keywords they used to find your website. This information is crucial to understanding how to optimize your conversion/sales process and discovering new opportunities.

4. Gain a clearer understanding of your campaign’s ROI.

If you’re not tracking conversions, it is impossible for you to know the true ROI of your campaign because you don’t know how much each visitor is costing you.

5. Remove the guesswork and avoid wasting time and money.

Without conversion tracking, you will have to rely on clicks, CTR, and pretty much guesses and gut feelings as to which of your keywords are converting. Conversion tracking marries your campaign data to conversion data so that you can understand what’s working (as well as what isn’t) and avoid making costly mistakes.

AdWords Conversion Tracking is a free tool that Google provides and should be a compulsory part of your PPC campaign. Even if you’re using third-party tools to track conversions, the addition of Google’s built-in conversion tracking for AdWords is a no brainer.

Need help understanding what this all means and how to make conversion tracking work for your campaign? Web Ad.vantages offers a full suite of PPC Campaign Management services. Give us a call at (410) 942-0488 or submit an RFP to learn how we can help.

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3. Analyze Competition: New AdWords Tool Helps Advertisers Stay Competitive
4. How To Set Up Event Tracking in Google Analytics (And Why You Should!)

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