Welcome to lesson 6 – Tracking your PPC conversions.

Conversion tracking is one of the most important parts of running PPC successfully. Without conversion tracking how can you know that the PPC is working? More importantly how can you know how effective it is? Conversion tracking allows you to improve the effectiveness of your PPC and improve your landing pages and the rest of your website. There are many ways to track and monitor visitors to your website and in this lesson we are going to cover 2 of these: AdWords Conversion Tracking and Analytics.

AdWords Conversion Tracking

This is deciding which page you want to class as a conversion and adding code to this page to track when people visit this page and how they got there. So the first question is: What do I want to track? Most of the time this is very simple. If you are selling products through your website then the obvious staring point is if you have sold a product. So for this you would set up a conversion called Item Sold and place the conversion code on the page that the visitor is sent to once they have bought a product or group of products from you. This is normally a confirmation page which lets people know that you have received the order and thanks them for their custom.

Adding a Conversion Code

First login to Google AdWords then follow these steps:

Step 1: Click on Reporting and Tools in the top menu then select Conversions from the drop down.

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Step 2: On the next screen click on the New Conversion button.

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Step 3: Enter your Action Name as Item Sold (or something similar) then select Purchase/Sale from the drop down box then click the Save and Continue button. In this menu you can see that you can set up different conversions and for this lesson we have just focussed on a purchase/sale conversion.

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Step 4: The next page is slightly more technical. You should know which page people are sent to once they have completed an order but if you don’t you will need to contact your website developer. Once you have this you will see that it either begins with HTTP for HTTPS. When you have this information you can select this option on this page. On this page you can also set the language to English (it normally defaults to Arabic). Then you can click Save and get code.

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Step 5: On the next page follow the instructions and copy the code that Google gives you then add this to your website or pass this to your website developers to add to your website on the order confirmation page.

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Google Analytics

You should already be aware of Google Analytics and here is a tutorial on how to set up Google Analytics. Google Analytics will allow you to track any of your visits effectively and is full of a wide range of features.

To get you started we will start with the basics. Tracking PPC Traffic and Monitoring Bounce Rates.

Tracking PPC Visits

To track PPC visits in Google Analytics login to your Analytics account and in the left hand menu click on Traffic Sources then click on Keywords. When the new view opens simply click on Paid under the Search sent x,xxx total visits via xx,xxx keywords (which is under the graph). This will give you the number of paid (PPC) visits to your website and the phrases that people typed in to find your website.

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Bounce Rates

Bounce Rates is another great way to track whether keyphrases are working effectively or not. The Bounce Rate is simply the percentage of people that visit one page of your website then leave without viewing any other pages. You want the Bounce Rate to be as low as possible. If possible this should be below 25% however this will sometimes be higher for a variety of factors. An example of this is when you want people to call you and you have your phone number on the landing page. Therefore people may only visit this page and call you.

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There are many other ways to monitor how effective your PPC and SEO is working and these will be included in future advanced lessons.