When optimising an AdWords account, it’s extremely important to make sure you are tracking conversions.  These might be such items as:

• Sales, for an ecommerce website
• Brochure requests
• Call back requests
• Contact us requests

The reason you need to track conversions, is to see which keywords are working for you, so you can up the budget for these keywords, and eventually consider pausing keywords that do not convert.

Your AdWords conversion tracking code needs to be generated by going into Reporting and Tools – then Conversions.  Choose the relevant conversion type and generate the required code.  Send this code to your web designer and ask them to place it onto the people see once they completed the required action.  This is extremely important!

Now here’s where the problem occurs – it’s very common for web designers to place the code onto the contact page, or the lead page.  This then creates false conversions, and you can very rapidly end up with hundreds of them!

What will be the end result?  A falsely optimised AdWords campaign, with the results skewed by people who were just trying to find your location, or even those who were seeking totally unrelated products…

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If your budget is limited – consider running a test campaign in Google AdWords.

I suggest starting off with just a few of your high margin products if your website is an ecommerce site  – otherwise if your website is selling services, select just a couple of these to advertise.

The next step is to focus carefully within AdWords on these products.  For example, let’s take a look at our wonderful client Nubie who sell Brio Sing Prams.  Create an Ad Group called Brio Sing, and carefully add just a couple of relevant keywords to the group as below:

• brio sing prams
• [brio sing prams]
• “brio sing prams”
• brio sing travel systems
• [brio sing travel systems]
• “brio sing travel systems”

It’s important to add in the three different match types as denoted above with the square brackets, speech marks, and just the plain keyword. The reasons behind this belong in another post – but just ensure you add the same keyword with the 3 different ways to AdWords.

Try adding in a few of these products to start with, before gradually expanding, carefully adding in new products and checking how well they perform.

Before you go live with the campaign, make sure you have conversion tracking set up.  More on this in this post.  This way you will be able to prove that the sales came from AdWords, as well be able to see which keywords resulted in the actual conversions.

Good luck!  Let us know how you get on.

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If you’re running an AdWords campaign, you MUST be tracking conversions.  And that doesn’t mean you only need to pay attention to this if you sell products online.  Here are some ideas of web actions you could and SHOULD be tracking:

• Newsletter signups
• Contact form submissions
• Quotation requests
• “Ask a question” form submissions
• And of course, sales!

If you track these conversions in AdWords, you will be able to see specifically which keywords resulted in a conversion for the above.  This then allows you to focus your spending on these keywords and their Ad Groups.

But how do I add a conversion I hear you cry?

Go to :  Opportunities - Conversions (bottom left hand corner) – New Conversion

Give your action a sensible name such as “Lead” and set the Tracking Purpose to match.  In this case set it to Lead.

Now choose Save and Continue.

None of the options on the next page normally need to be changed except it your website is secure (https), in which case you need to set it to Page Security level – Https in the top box.

Choose Save and get Code.

This HTML code needs to be inserted on the page people see when they have completed the action, normally a thank you page.  Don’t have one?  Ask your web designer to create one.

Now over to you – what new actions should you create and track so you’re tracking the effectiveness of YOUR AdWords campaign?

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