Why do 3 out of 5 AdWords Clients Fail to Setup Google Con­ver­sion Tracking?

I am stunned that the major­tiy of Google AdWords clients we start work­ing with have not setup Google con­ver­sion track­ing.  By now you know one of our favorite mantras:

Track and test every­thing because you can only improve what you can measure.”

Google con­ver­sion track­ing is a bril­liant tool that Google offers for free that every Google AdWords adver­tiser should be using.  My guess why most AdWords users don’t use it is because they don’t know about it and they are not sure how to imple­ment it.

So, here are some very sim­ple steps:

1) Login to your Google AdWords account and click on “Con­ver­sion Tracking”

Once you click on “Con­ver­sion Track­ing” Google offers very sim­ple step by step instruc­tions to make it fast and easy for you to get every­thing setup.  All you need to do is to grab a piece of code from Google and paste it into your goal page (the page that users end up on after tak­ing the desired action).

2) What goal should I opti­mize Google AdWords for?

Pick the most wanted response of your land­ing page.  If you are going straight for the sale, then your goal would be to track sales (i.e. con­ver­sions).  If your most wanted response is to first cap­ture leads (i.e. email addresses) then make this your goal to track via Google. 

If you cap­ture leads, it is going to be much faster to opti­mize your Google AdWords account because it is about 10 times eas­ier to cap­ture leads than it is to make a sale.  So, cap­tur­ing leads and opti­miz­ing against leads will be 10 times faster.

Once you are all done, every time you check any of your Cam­paigns and Ad Groups you will auto­mat­i­cally see two new columns being added. 

In the image above, note the two new high­lighted columns.  These two columns help you to rapidly see how your Ad Groups are doing.  At one glance you know whether vis­i­tors from this Ad Group are con­vert­ing and how much you are spend­ing for every goal (lead or sale). 

Hav­ing this con­ver­sion data right in front of you allows you to opti­mize your AdWords account in record time and it also helps you to avoid mak­ing costly mis­takes (such as keep­ing the wrong ads or over bid­ding on key­words).  The con­ver­sion data is absolutely crit­i­cal to help you start get­ting the most out of Google AdWords and it is very sim­ple and easy to setup.

One word of cau­tion - Google con­ver­sion data is not 100% accurate

While I am a huge advo­cate of using Google con­ver­sion track­ing, I would rec­om­mend to only use it as an indi­ca­tor to gage how you are doing.  

Let me explain, we have con­ducted many tests where we com­pared our actual sales from Google AdWords to the sales count reported by Google con­ver­sion track­ing.  The results:

In all of our tests, Google con­ver­sion track­ing was under report­ing sales  by up to 20–30%. 

How did we get this result? 

We have even more rig­or­ous inter­nal track­ing sys­tems in place and noticed that we see more sales from Google than Google is counting.  So, it pays to dou­ble check because if sales are actu­ally bet­ter than what Google is report­ing, then you might be able to afford to bid more per click than you would have oth­er­wised believed.   

Set­ting up Google con­ver­sion track­ing is only one of six cru­cial steps in set­ting up a win­ning Google AdWords sys­tem.  To find out what the other steps are check out AdWords Sys­tem Exposed.

Click here if you want to check out other case stud­ies and help­ful Google AdWords Tips

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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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