Rule #1: Start using AdWords Con­ver­sion Track­ing Today

Rule #2: Know What Con­ver­sions To Track in AdWords

I am shocked that even after so many years, time and time again I see lots of new AdWords cus­tomers that do not use AdWords Con­ver­sion Tracking.

Why do so many new AdWords users not do what it takes to succeed?

I am not sure but let me try to help by fur­ther empha­siz­ing the impor­tance of using the AdWords Con­ver­sion Track­ing.

Every AdWords adver­tiser will have a sales fun­nel that looks some­thing like this:

Your AdWords Account gets 100,000 impres­sions and with a click-through-rate of 5% you end up with 5,000 vis­i­tors to your site.

You man­age to have a sign-up rate of 20% and cap­ture 1,000 leads of which 50 end up buy­ing your product.

How­ever, just know­ing these fig­ures at the aggre­gate level is NOT enough!

To suc­ceed with AdWords you MUST know your sign-up rate and con­ver­sion rate at the cam­paign, ad group, and key­word level. With­out this infor­ma­tion you will NOT stand any chance of thriv­ing in AdWords.

A lot of peo­ple always ask me… what sign-up rate and con­ver­sion rates can I expect. I will give you some rules of thumb that we have learned over the past few years.

Sign-up Con­ver­sion Track­ing Rates in AdWords
Exam­ple: For infor­ma­tion / soft­ware prod­ucts where your ini­tial goal is to just build a list via free reports, free tri­als, etc.

* A signup rate of 30%+ is great
* A signup rate of 20%+ is good
* A signup rate of 10%+ is ok
* A signup rate of <10% is bad

The actual results will vary greatly by key­word, by mar­ket, and by your land­ing page. How­ever, if your goal is to first build a list (cap­ture a lead) then the above is a good rule of thumb. Unless your signup rate is above 10%, it will be very hard to make any money via AdWords.

Once you build a list, here are some bench­marks on con­ver­sion rates for your list that you can expect.

* A sales rate (sales / sign-ups) of 20+% is fan­tas­tic
* A sales rate (sales / sign-ups) of 10+% is very good
* A sales rate (sales / sign-ups) of 5%+ is good
* A sales rate (sales / sign-ups) of 3%+ is ok
* A sales rate of (sales / sign-ups) of <3% is bad

Sales Con­ver­sion Track­ing Rates in AdWords
Exam­ple: For infor­ma­tion and / or soft­ware prod­ucts where you goal is to instantly go for a sale with­out build­ing a list.

* A con­ver­sion rate of 4%+ is fan­tas­tic
* A con­ver­sion rate of 3%+ is great
* A con­ver­sion rate of 2%+ is very good
* A con­ver­sion rate of 1%+ is good
* A con­ver­sion rate of 0.5%+ is ok
* A con­ver­sion rate of <0.5% is bad

Please not that our exam­ples are based on sell­ing per­sonal devel­op­ment and Inter­net mar­ket­ing soft­ware and infor­ma­tion prod­ucts. The indi­vid­ual results will vary sharply but these are just some gen­eral met­rics you might find useful.

A few more impor­tant points: What should you track in AdWords Con­ver­sion Track­ing? Sign-ups or Sales?

The answer is obvi­ously both but in Google’s inter­face they will only show you one con­ver­sion met­ric. To get to the other con­ver­sion met­rics you will need to dig deeper and use the Google reports. Per­son­ally, I always use “sign-up” track­ing as my most wanted response on all of our PPC campaigns.

Why? Because I can inno­vate much faster. Lets revisit the sales funnel.

As you can see, by the time I get to 50 sales, I will have already got­ten 1,000 sign-ups!

Since I can only opti­mize my ads and my key­word bids after I have col­lected enough data for the results to be sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant, I can opti­mize 20 times faster (1,000 sign-ups vs. 50 sales) by focus­ing first on sign-ups.

This gives us a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage because we can split test our ads and adjust our key­word bids much faster than some­one that only tracks sales.

So, if you have not started using the AdWords Con­ver­sion Track­ing, you can get started in just 5 minutes.

To con­tinue learn­ing about AdWords check out:
www.TheComingAdWordsWar.com
www.AdWordsSystemExposed9.com

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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