Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

Google has made yet another change to their Google AdWords reports in the area of conversion tracking.

Conversion tracking is one of the most important aspects of any PPC advertising account and you need to be sure that you have this installed correctly. Conversion tracking allows your account to be managed to the most important criteria for your business – and that is – “What am I getting out of this?”.

What Google AdWords has changed is the name of “Conversions” to “Conversions (1-per-click)” and they have added a new metric called “Conversions (many-per-click)”. The Conversion (1-per-click) field can only be filled once per customer and the Conversions (many-per-click) is incremented whenever any conversion occurs within 30 days after a click.

This can mean a couple of things to you depending on what your conversion structure is.

First, if your conversion is strictly measuring sales, it can mean that you have customers that come back within the first 30 days after their first purchase to purchase again. This is especially common in stores that sell commodities or that cross-sell a customer with more accessories to compliment their first purchase. (By the way – that begs the question – what kind of follow-up do you have with a first time customer to be sure they have everything they need and are you measuring the success of that follow-up?)

Also, if you have setup several types of conversions to be tracked on your site – for example, mailing list sign-up, contact form and sale – the “many-per-click” field will give you information about customers that have performed several goals on your site. You may have customers that do all three and that will show up in the many-per-click field. There are additional fields regarding the type of conversion that will give you the information you need to micro-manage these conversion types as well.

And don’t forget, Google AdWords revenue tracking can be exceptionally powerful for tracking specific revenue achieved for each specific product sold. This is certainly not for everyone, but can be incredibly valuable when applicable and is usually very easy to implement. If you have questions or need help with this, contact a professional PPC Management Company for asssitance.

The bottom line is this – understand what these Google AdWords conversion tracking numbers mean to you and use this valuable information to enhance your sales-funnel on your website.

Read this if you’ve been PPC advertising with Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) since before June 2007. If you’re a new-ish YSM user (since July 2007), then feel free to ignore this blog.

YSM converted to a new platform called Panama in June 2007. At the same time they came out with new conversion tracking JavaScript, while still supporting the original Overture legacy code. Lately, there have been intermittent issues with the legacy code – Security Warnings might be triggered in a shopping cart, conversions might not be tracked accurately, or tracked at all.

To solve the issue or prevent one from happening, the old JavaScript needs to be replaced by the new tracking JavaScript. To get the new code, login to your Yahoo account, click on the Administration tab, and choose the Analytics link. You most likely will have to activate Analytics, then copy the JavaScript code. Replace the old code with the new code where necessary on your website.

To see if you are using the old code, check your Thank You page(s) and look for JavaScript in the head tag. If the JavaScript has the the line “Overture Services Inc. 07/15/2003″ in it, than it’s the old Legacy code. If the JavaScript has “Yahoo! Inc.” in it, it’s the new code, and you don’t have to do anything.