Everyone wants to stretch their AdWords budget to get the best ROI for their money, but how do you know that you are performing at your best? Google includes a tool in standard Adwords accounts called conversion tracking. Put simply, conversion tracking allows you to monitor a user’s actions on your website and links that data to your AdWords stats in terms of budget. You can setup several different types of actions, which are goals that you want your user to accomplish, such as signing up for a newsletter, clicking on a button, completing a purchase, or submitting a form. The action types are:
- Leads
- Signup
- Purchase / Sale
- View of a Key Page
- Other
Setting up the conversion tracking is relatively straightforward. Once you create and name your action you are provided with a snippet of Javascript to place in your page. Results are tracked immediately and can be monitored at the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels. Once enough results are calculated, you will be able to see how much it costs you for a user to take an action. For example, in a week if you have 100 clicks at $2.00 / click and 15 conversions then each conversion will have cost you $13.33. Using this information can become a metric for performance. You can work on decreasing your cost per click, increasing your Quality Score, and reducing you cost per conversion.
Good Luck!