Google AdWords is very useful tool for gaining exposure and generating new leads for your business online. The overall concept is pretty straight forward — bid on keywords that are relevant your business, advertise your products and services using descriptive text and calls to action, and direct potential customers to corresponding pages on your website.
On the surface, it isn’t hard to see how certain keywords and ads are performing. Google provides basic metrics such as overall impressions, clicks, and clickthrough rate at the Campaign and Ad Group levels. As a reminder, impressions are how often potential customers see your ads, clicks indicate a click on your ad, and clickthrough rate is a percentage of how often potential customers click through to your ad.
While these metrics are useful in understanding how your keywords and ads are doing, advertisers may want to dig a little deeper to determine on-site behavior. That is, what potential customers are doing once they reach your website. Sure, it’s great that a potential buyer saw your ad and visited your website. But what if they immediately exited the website without taking further action. How would you know?
With Conversions, advertisers are able to more accurately track onsite behavior. For small businesses, a phone call or contact form submission through the website are examples of conversions you might want to keep track of.
To get started, navigate to Tools>Conversions at the top of your screen. From there, simply indicate the conversion that you would like to track and follow the corresponding instructions.
Certain conversions will require the installation of code on each page you wish to track. For example, if you’re trying to track the number of contact form submissions on your contact us page, be sure to install the tracking code on that page. If you’re uncomfortable with installing the code, it is best to contact an AdWords rep for assistance.
If it’s phone calls from your website that you wish to track, Google will give you the option to use call forwarding. Essentially what this means is that Google will display a special phone number for users that come to your website via ads. Call forwarding helps you more accurately measure calls coming from your ads.
What Else Should I know?
When setting up conversions, you may assign a monetary value to each conversion you create, basically indicating its worth to your business. Conversion values can also be of use when calculating a cost analysis of your paid search strategy. With regards to overall bid strategy, it is possible to optimize your bids for more conversions. To take advantage of this feature be sure to check it off when setting up each conversion.
Overall, Conversions are a great way to determine whether you are getting your money’s worth out of AdWords.