One of the most important parts of using Google Adwords is being able to track conversions accurately. After you’ve made your selection of keywords, created a compelling ad, and then implemented your Google Adwords campaign, the next step is to start tracking conversions and reviewing the results.

A common way to track conversions is to look at your landing page hits and your sales quantity for a given period. However, Google provides Adwords advertisers some tools to automate the process. Below are some guidelines for tracking your conversions with Google Adwords.

If you’re checkout process involves using a shopping cart or requires confirmation on the end of a buyer, you need to embed your conversion link using Javascript. JavaScript is required to send information back to the Google Adwords tracker.

This tool allows you to track the ads that clicked through and produced a complete conversion; bear in mind that this tool does not allow you to see the number of visitors to the site. Just place the few lines of code into your website, and then access your conversion tracking reports directly on the ‘Campaign Summary’ page in the Reports Center of Google Adwords.

Conversion tracking will only produce accurate results if you meet these two conditions: First is that you must be running approved Adwords ads on your site. The second condition is only your conversion page should contain the tracking code.

You can confirm that the code is working by doing a complete conversion yourself. Just remember not to click on your own ads as this is against Adword’s TOS. Once a conversion is done, you will be able to see the click-through and conversion data within twenty-four hours.

This tracking method will also work with PayPal and most payment checkout systems. PayPal offers a page wherein you can insert your Javascript tracking code. If a customer completes Paypal’s payment process, that transaction would then be recorded into your conversion tracking report.

Authors Sarah Milstein, J.D. Biersdorfer and Mathew McDonald of the book “Google: The Missing Manual”, explain that it’s also important to determine your total cost-per-conversion over any given campaign period.

This information will let you understand how much it actually costs to generate your sale; you can calculate this by using the free conversion-tracking tools and matching the number of conversions up with the total cost of your campaign for any given period of time. To calculate this, you will need to produce a summary report of keyword purchases at the end of each month and divide the number of conversions by your total costs to run the ad.

Advertising with Google Adwords is an effective technique that most websites can use to attract more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the most important skills to have when using Adwords – and there are several good training resources available online.

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