Google AdWords - How To Track Conversions

As I'm sure you know; when a visitor to your website signs up for your newsletter, buys a product or even fills out a form this is classed as a conversion. The reason you're probably paying for traffic to your website is to increase your conversions.

It's important to track your conversions. But why?


Let's say you're running a campaign to increase the number of subscribers to your weight loss newsletter. You might be paying $20 per day and getting 100 new subscribers per day - but how do you know these subscribers are coming from AdWords?

By tracking your conversions you can see where the visitor came from and therefore which campaign is performing at its best.

You can also make your campaign more efficient by removing keywords that don't convert well - thus reducing your costs.

So how do you track conversions in Google AdWords?

It's really quite simple. All you need to do is setup conversion tracking in AdWords and then copy-and-paste some code into your website.

Let's get started!

1) Login to your AdWords account

2) Select a campaign you want to setup conversions for

3) Under "Reporting" select "Conversions"

4) Select "+ New conversion"

5) Choose an action name e.g. "newsletter signup" and select a purpose for the conversion e.g. "signup"

6) Your security level for the page will probably be http unless you're using a secure certificate (SSL)

7) Enter any revenue for the conversion. If it's a newsletter signup it will probably be zero

8) You can also change the look of the tracking indicator. Under the terms of the AdWords conversion tracking you must tell the user of your website that you are tracking conversions

9) All you need to do now is copy-and-paste the code produced into the page on your website where the conversion is completed. Personally, I insert the code on the page where the user is taken to once they confirm their email address. That way I know their conversion is 100% complete.

There you go, that's all there is to is! Now all the clicks that turn into conversions will be tracked on AdWords. This is especially useful for keywords effectiveness.

After a few days of running a campaign, view your keywords for the campaign and sort the keywords in order of clicks. Then look to see how many of those clicks turned into conversions. If there are some keywords that have high clicks but low or even zero conversions, remove them from your campaign. There just wasting you money!