What happens after the click: conversion tracking

Video: Turn more clicks into profits with Conversion Tracking

One of the main advantages of online advertising is the ability to track your results and measure your exact return on investment.

As we've seen, with Google AdWords, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and you can decide exactly how much you want to pay for that click. This is the starting point to measuring and improving our ROI - we now know exactly how much we need to spend to get 100 visitors to our website; and we can continue to drive that cost down by spending 10 minutes optimising our account every week.

But what happens after a user clicks on your ad? Did they buy your product; call you; or subscribe to your newsletter?

Using Conversion Tracking to measure ROI

With AdWords Conversion Tracking, you can measure your ad conversions. A conversion could be anything of value to you, depending on your business goal:

• Sale, when someone completes a purchase on your website
  
• Lead, when someone requests a follow-up call
  
• Sign-up, for subscriptions or newsletters
  
• Page view, to see how many people interacted with specific content

By linking your keywords directly to the conversions you'd like them to achieve, you can measure exactly how many of the users that clicked on your ad, ended up taking this action.

You can now determine not only how much it costs you to get 100 visitors to your website, but how much it would cost to make 50 sales or generate 70 call-backs. With this information, you can determine your exact ROI and make sure your online advertising is always working for you.

Using Conversion Tracking to optimize your ad campaigns

Conversion Tracking can show you which keywords are helping you meet your specific goals by connecting them to conversions. If you know which keywords bring you the most business and which ones don't, you can make smarter investments in those keywords. In turn, you boost your return on investment.

Let's say you own a flower shop. You have a website. And when users submit their orders online, they see a "Thank you for your purchase!" page.

Now, suppose you want to see which of your keywords - Keyword #1 or Keyword #2 - leads to more users buying flowers, so you set up Conversion Tracking. First, you get a little snippet of code from AdWords. Then, you paste that code snippet in the HTML for the "Thank you for your purchase!" page.

Soon, you start to see that users who click on Keyword #2 buy a lot of flowers. Meanwhile, you see that a few people click on Keyword #1, but none of them buy flowers. So, you decide to stop investing in Keyword #1 and put more resources toward Keyword #2, resulting in more purchases and a better return on your investment.

Setting up conversion tracking

1. Click on the "Reporting" tab in your AdWords account
   
2. Select "Conversions" in the drop down menu
   
3. Click "New conversion" and follow the steps
   

AdWords will generate a snippet of HTML code for you or your webmaster to place on the page you want to track. Once the code is applied, AdWords Conversion Tracking places a cookie on a user's computer or mobile phone when he or she clicks on one of your ads. If the user reaches one of your conversion pages, AdWords records a successful conversion for you.

You can track all your conversion metrics and reports from within your AdWords account.

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