Well, you have been using Google Adwords for some time, you're getting plenty of clicks from a large selection of keywords, but how do you know which keywords are the ones that are generating your sales? Does it matter as long as the campaign is paying its way?
What's a Conversion?A conversion is generally used to describe the moment when a visitor to your website becomes a customer (i.e. when they move from just browsing your site to purchasing something from you), although it can represent the moment where they take any action that you want them to (e.g. completing a survey; asking you for more information etc.).
Why do I need to track them?If you owned a shop in the high street and got plenty of customers you'd be happy wouldn't you? If you knew what brought most of those customers to your shop in the first place wouldn't that be better still? Then you could shift your marketing budget so that more of it was spent targeting that sort of visitor, which sould greatly
improve your return on Marketing spend.
The same logic is true for websites. The website is your shop window. You will (hopefully) get lots of people to come in and look around, but what you really need to know is what type of person is buying from you, where did they come from, how did they find out about you etc.
How can I track conversions through my website?There are actually lots of ways. Google can give you some code which you plug into your website which will capture information about the visitors who arrive via your Adwords Campaign. You can then go to your campaign page in Google and see which keyword clicks actually resulted in a sale / conversion for you. You can also modify your website yourself to track all incoming visitors, and the keywords they have used to search for you.
Whatever method you use the most important thing is to know which keywords / websites etc delivered the most customers to you. If you use Google Adwords you can remove the keywords that are not generating sales, thereby increasing the amount of your budget which goes to the
keywords that do generate sales. Simple really, but it's surprising that many website owners do not do this!
The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.