Adwords conversion tracking

Dated Friday October 18, 2013

We all love to improve sales. In order to improve the sales on our website we improve the traffic to our website. One popular way of increasing the traffic is the use of Addwords. Using adwords will improve the traffic to your website, but will it improve sales? You know how much the ad campaigns are costing you, but do you know how much they bring you? To find the answer to this you need to know the conversion rate of your adwords campaings. Once you know the conversion rate, you can use the following formula the get the cost for adword per order:

traffic x conversion rate x average cost per click = cost per order

if you have the conversion rates in percentages you need to devide it by 100 in the formula above.

Relative Adword conversion rate

De conversion rate for adwords is a start in figuring out if its worth it. But it still doesn't tell you if addwords are the best option for increasing sales. What if you spend the same amount on a SEO expert? Or start spending more time on promoting on social media? Or pay for blog posts? Could it be that investing one of these will have a higher pay-out then addwords?

In order to figure out the best resource to invest in, in order to maximize sales, you need to know the conversion rate of each source. When you know the conversion rates you can determine the costs version the conversion rates. The resource with the lowest cost versus its conversion rate will be the best resource to invest in. To determen the conversion rate of each resource you can use Conversion Analytics. Conversion Analytics is a statistic program, much like Google Analytics, but focusses on conversion rates. Once installed (copy past a javascript line into your website) it will automaticly detect the source of the visitor and calculate the conversion rate of each visitor.

Conversion rates for each step

When a certain resource, like addwords, has a relative low conversion rate compared to other resources its most likely the expactation the resource gave the visitor which is to blame. May be your ad speaks of a free offer, but somewhere in the registration proces some costst pop up. Or you promote an easy to order e-book, but the visitor is forced to fill in a 20 field form. When looking at the conversion rates in each step you can easily detect the couse of the problem. It it the step with the order form? The page where the visitor has to agree to your terms of service? Whatever the cause, once you know you can change the false expaction you've created by changing the message in your ad. Improving the conversion rate for you ad and getting more bang for your buck!

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