Improvements to AdWords Conversion Tracking

AdWords conversion tracking is a free AdWords tool to help you understand what happens after a user clicks on your ad. By knowing which clicks most often lead to conversions, you can spend your money most effectively – on the clicks most likely to lead to a conversion.

We've recently improved conversion tracking. You can now define the actions that are most important to your business and track conversions on each of those actions independently.

Why is conversion tracking important?
Clicks on different keywords can lead to different types of conversions and in different frequencies, so it’s important to know how well a particular keyword performs when deciding how much to bid. Most advertisers will want to bid higher on keywords which convert well for them and lower on the others. In this way, conversion tracking helps you improve your ROI.

How does it work?
Using conversion tracking involves inserting a small snippet of code into specific pages on your website that indicate an important event has occurred, for example, the order confirmation page you show after a purchase. When a visitor clicks on your ad and eventually reaches this page, AdWords will register a conversion. You can then view this data as part of your account statistics and reports.

Please note that Quality Score does not consider data from AdWords conversion tracking. However, your conversion rates are taken into account by the Conversion Optimizer when determining whether ads have high enough bids to show.

What's new?
You can now define and track your own conversion types that are important to your business. For instance, if you are selling flowers online, you might have one conversion type for Mother's Day bouquets, and another for graduation bouquets to differentiate between your two best-selling products.

Defining and tracking several types of conversions will give you more detail about how conversions occur on your website. Using AdWords Conversion Tracking is also the first step towards qualifying for the Conversion Optimizer, AdWords' CPA bidding feature which has helped many advertisers save time and money.

You can start using AdWords conversion tracking by clicking on “Conversion Tracking” in your AdWords account. If you are using AdWords Starter Edition, you will need to graduate to Standard Edition before using conversion tracking. For more information and help getting started, take a look at these articles in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Trevor, Inside AdWords crew