After all the hard work you put in to run your business, wouldn’t it be great if your advertising efforts prove to be profitable? Wouldn’t you like to know which efforts have been yielding the most success? There’s many important metrics to evaluate in AdWords, but tracking conversions could possibly be the most telling for what is working and what is not.
What Are Conversions?
A conversion can mean many things, but generally a conversion happens when a visitor goes to your website and completes a desired goal. This can be something simple like filling out a form or making a purchase. Conversions are tracked and can be calculated into a conversion rate, which tells you the percentage of successful goals that took place.
Setting Up Conversion Tracking
Before we get started, first make sure you have conversion tracking setup in your account. Here is a great walk-through that outlines the process.
Some Useful Conversions You Might Want To Track
There are many things you can track as conversions; they don’t all have to be sales related. Here is a list of some commons conversions you can track.
1. Webform Submissions
You can generate leads by asking potential customers to fill out a webform. Ultimately, you choose what information the webform will contain. One advantage of webforms is that you can track which leads were generated by your ads and how many of these ultimately resulted in sales.You can also use these leads to do follow ups. It is common to set up conversion tracking for webforms by adding the conversion code to the “thank you” page that follows the webform submission.
2. Online Sales with Revenue
This is the most straightforward type of conversion. Someone clicks through your ads and ultimately makes a purchase. You can assign a value to your lead. It’s easy. When you set up the conversion in AdWords they ask you to assign a value, all you have to do is enter how much it’s worth. This way you’ll know your cost per acquisition. In addition you will have insight to your ROAS (return on advertising spending).
3. Calls from Ads
You can see directly how many of your mobile click-to-call ads result in actual phone calls — different than a call extension. This feature is available when you create a “call only” type of campaign. The phone number shows at the top of the ad and is ready to be dialed on a mobile device.
4. Calls from Website
AdWords allows you to track how many phone calls are attributed to your ads even when the phone number isn’t directly listed on the ad itself. So if a person clicks on your ad, finds the phone number on the website and calls, that can be tracked as a conversion. This is technical to set up so you should advise your webmaster before implementing.
Custom Conversions
You even have the option to go into Google Analytics and create a custom conversion, also known as a goal. These can help marketers if they want to know something very specific like how many users spent seventy-five seconds or more on your site, or how many users had a bounce rate of forty percent or lower, or even how many new users clicked on at least two pages during their session. The combinations are endless. As you dive deeper into your data, you may find that you need these to track very specific events on your website. Like much of advertising, you may have to run A/B testing to find out what’s working best.
If an intended conversion is not performing to par, it could be time to make changes to the audience you’re reaching, the website or overall strategy. Research and testing is key. Make sure you allow enough time for your campaigns to run before making any hasty decisions.
AdWords allows you to see at a very macroscopic or microscopic level which aspects of your campaign are receiving the most or least conversions. When you know what specifically is converting, you can make the best strategy decisions as a marketer.
For more information on how to take get the most of your conversions please contact us.
