Tracking your conversions is one of the most important elements in any PPC campaign. You will not be able to optimize your campaign if you cannot track your conversions accurately.

Google offers two valuable conversion tracking tools through the Adwords platform, but you may decide you want to simply rely on landing page hits or the number of sales generated from a particular link you used within the ad. Whatever the case may be, here are some tips for tracking 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.

Using this method will allow you track the number of complete conversions for each ad. This tool, however, does not show you the number of visitors to the site. After placing the code in your website, you can then access the tracking reports under ‘Campaign Summary’ page in 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.

You can still track your conversions if you are using a payment checkout system, like PayPal. PayPal and most other systems offer a conversion confirmation webpage wherein you can insert your Adwords tracking code. You will have a record of all conversions or sales once a customer successfully completes the checkout process.

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 tell you the actual costs of generating a sale with your campaign. To calculate this, match the number of conversions with the total cost of campaign for a certain period.

Advertising with Google Adwords is a powerful technique that most online-businesses can use to attract more customers. Creating quality Google Ads is one of the best skills to have when using Adwords – and there are several quality training resources available online.

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