Businesses spend thousands of dollars every month in Internet marketing campaigns especially Adwords. It becomes essential for a business to carefully analyze and track the Return on Investment (ROI) for the campaigns running Adwords.
Conversion tracking is a great way to measure your ad performance with respect to your business goals and find out the exact ROI for your ads running via different PPC campaigns.
What are AdWords Conversions?
A conversion is any achieved business goal. These can be different for different businesses. Actions performed by your customer like purchasing a product from your site, signing up for a newsletter, filling out a survey, downloading an app, etc. are all forms of successful conversions. These conversions happen on your site every time a visitor performs the desired action specified by you as a conversion in your analytics.
In simple terminology, actions that lead to sales or profits to a company are known as conversions. For businesses running several ads using the Adwords platform, it is essential to identify keywords that are bringing in the maximum sales, leads, or conversions for them. This is made possible by AdWords conversion tracking.
What is Conversion Tracking?
Identification of keywords leading to clicks and sales (conversions) is known as “conversion tracking”. This feature allows you to identify the best performing keywords for your business thereby providing you with an option to invest more on the best performing keywords and less on least performing keywords. (See Google guide for conversion tracking for learning in detail about the various types of conversions).
How to Start Tracking Conversions?
Tracking conversions conversions, and thus your AdWords ROI, is extremely easy. Just follow the steps given below to get started:-
- Sign up for an Adwords account.
- Click the Tools tab and select conversions.
- Click on the conversion button.
- Fill in the conversion name field with the type of conversion you want to track like “sale”, “lead”, “sign up” etc.
- Select webpage if you want to track conversions happening on your website.
- Select the category and assign a value to your conversion.
- Click save and get the conversion tracking snippet.
- Add the snippet on your conversion page. Your AdWords conversion page would be the one where the customers land after performing an action. For example, after a customer purchases a product, they land on the “thank you” page. You need to add the AdWords conversion code to this page.
That’s it! Once you have installed the tracking code, all the successful conversions would be tracked and get displayed in your Adwords account.
Advantages of Conversion Tracking
If you truly intend to achieve success with AdWords (and get the most bang for your AdWords bucks!), conversion tracking is a must.
Really, do you want to be spending all that money and not know exactly what is producing the results? Even if you are achieving AdWords results, conversion tracking will show you exactly which ads are producing, and which are not, so you can more effectively allocate your money.
Here are just a few more of the advantages of AdWords tracking:
- It helps to find out how many clicks in your ads resulted in purchases.
- It helps you to find out which keywords and ads are most effective for your business.
- Conversions from your ad can be tracked in as little as 24 hours.
- Every business has its own goals and conversions can be customized for each type of goal.
- It lets you to take effective advertising decisions by spending less on low performing keywords and investing more on high performing keywords.
Tips to Increase AdWords ROI
There are several factors which indirectly affects the conversion rate of your site. Here are some successful tips for increasing AdWords ROI:
Target Your Ads Based on Geo Location– Always target ads based on proper geo location. Suppose if your target market is Texas, USA then you must run your ad for audiences based in Texas, USA only. Many advertisers make this mistake of running ad campaigns globally irrespective of their target market location and end up decreasing their ROI.
Optimize Your Ad Copy– A catchy headline and ad description can capture more clicks. It can make an ad more relevant thereby reducing your bidding rate. An optimized ad copy performs far better in the search results and leads to more successful conversions. Search management company, Webrageous discusses some really good optimization decisions for your PPC campaigns. These tips can help your ad to perform better in the search results.
Run the Best Performing Ads– The conversion tracking report will let you identify the best performing keywords in your ad campaign. You must invest more money in your revenue generating ads.
Optimize the Landing Page– You must make all of your landing pages user friendly and the call to action must be properly defined on each of these pages. If the user does not find what he/she is looking for then you may lose your chances of earning maximum revenue with every click.
Add Special Ad Enhancements– In order to increase ROI, try special ad enhancements from Adwords like site links, review ratings, image display, social annotations etc.
Perform Intelligent Bidding– Ad bidding is extremely vital for the success of your campaigns. You must try to increase the ad quality score as this will help to reduce the bidding rate for your ads. Also, it is important to constantly monitor the bidding rates and adjust the amount spent on each click.
Keep Track of Your AdWords Conversions– Always monitor the keywords responsible for the maximum conversions. The best AdWords ad group should always be given priority in terms of revenue investment.
Conclusion: Increasing your AdWords ROI with Conversion Tracking
We hope that you now realize the true and necessary value of AdWords conversion tracking to determine your AdWords ROI. Obviously, we strongly suggest that you implement conversion tracking to identify your best performing keywords and improve ROI. This enables you to create a proper bidding strategy that can then be adopted based on the data received through conversion tracking. For businesses to succeed online, search marketing techniques like SEO and PPC are vital. Conversion tracking plays an effective role in both these channels of Internet marketing.
Author Bio
Joydeep Bhattacharya is a search engine optimization professional with over 5 years of industry experience. He loves to be associated with the search engine industry and also owns a personal Seo blog, seosandwitch.com where he shares stuff related to SEO, SMO, and internet marketing. You may connect with him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter@seoforu.