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Conversion tracking is one of the most important pieces of the PPC puzzle, because it lets you track results at the keyword level. Ideally your site is also equipped with an analytics package that lets you see your site’s performance in a lot more detail to see what happens between click and conversion, but if for some reason it isn’t, here are a couple quick ways to use engine conversion code to get a little more information.

In order to keep your original data valid, I’d recommend a test of any of these ideas in a mirrored account (not campaign).

Basic Sales Funnel: Google allows for five different conversion code names. Add conversion code to every page of your checkout process or important conversion steps, making sure a unique named code is on each page. After a desired amount of time run an account report with each of the conversion types selected, and you’ll see each page leading towards your final conversion has fewer and fewer conversions. This is a basic sales funnel. You can use the difference in numbers between each page to determine where you’re losing people, and how to optimize the page to minimizing that right now.

Landing Page Testing: If you have a new page you want to test performance on (which you should do occasionally), you can use Google’s 3rd party tracking on that page to measure conversion rate on the new page instead of your current page.  Copy an ad within an ad group and modify the destination URL, and then compare conversion rates between the two ads.

Measuring Bounce Rates In case you’re not running analytics (and why aren’t you?) you could add the conversion code to every page of a website except landing pages.  What this will do is show you how many people moved beyond the landing page to other areas of the site, vs. how many people clicked on an ad, and then left the site.  Divide the number of conversions by the number of clicks, and subtract 1, and this is your bounce rate in a percentage.

When performing any of these tests, keep in mind the difference between the number of conversions and the number of transactions.  If you run a report, make sure the “transactions” checkbox is checked, as this will tell you how many additional conversions got counted from the same person.  If a visitor comes back to your site within 30 days on Google or Yahoo, or 7 days from MSN, any other actions taken will still count as 1 conversion, but multiple transactions.

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Tags: General PPC, adwords //