How To Track Your Results
One important milestone in turning your ad groups in money makers is deciding which of them are winners and which ones are losers. See how tracking helps you do that.
Tracking results in PPC advertising is the way to know whether you’re making money or not. To see how your campaign really performs, you need to learn how to determine ROI, how to set your maximum bids, and generally how to keep a keen eye on every detail by using the right tools.
This article contains the basics about tracking results in your AdWords campaigns.
Why Tracking Is Important
When using AdWords, get used to a fact: nothing is ever static. Many things change with every hour and every day.
Even if the AdWords campaign doesn’t generate sales from the first day you’ve got it running, it still generates a great deal of precious data on how the ads perform and about the users that click on them. This is information you just have to know, because it can help you improve results.
If you do conduct an AdWords campaign yourself, the best advice to take is never lose control. After a bit of practice you’ll find it’s very easy to think you’re winning the game when you’re actually losing it. And you’ll know what to do then.
There is an interesting theory that works well here: the “80-20” rule, discovered by Vilfredo Pareto. According to it, 20% of your AdWords campaigns will constantly bring you 80% of the profits. While another 20% of them will be permanently increasing your costs, causing you to lose money. Your main job is to identify those 20% and focus on them.
In Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, Chapter XIX you can read more about the “80-20” rule and how to use it wisely for a successful Adwords campaign.
How Tracking Works with AdWords
In order to do conversion tracking, you need to write a few specific lines of code on your website — a code snippet. From that moment on, when somebody clicks on one of your ads, a cookie is placed on their computer.
If that user goes further and reaches a “thank you” page (that is taking the final action — whether this involves buying something or not), the cookie is sent to a Google server, and registered as a successful conversion in your account. That is how much you can do about tracking within the limits of your AdWords account. To see exactly how this is done, please visit the Google AdWords Library and download the “Conversion Tracking Guide”.
Other Tracking Tools
Aside from Google’s tracking system, there are a lot of other tools you can use to track conversions.
Our advice is to take some time and study them, because the right use of tracking systems will bring you a lot more sales and will cut your costs.
By using tracking software you can:
- track visitors that come back to your website
- calculate the client value
- compare the efficiency (accuracy) of different tracking programs
- see exactly which ad group is winning and which one is losing money.
Your sale procedure may involve more steps than just a simple visit on your website. You may find it is more productive for you to bring visitors on your website in order to collect their contact data (in exchange for some freebies, maybe?) and conduct the sales process through another channel: email, telephone, or both.
Tools you can use:
- Clicktracks
- Keyword Max
- Urchin
- IndexTools
- WebSideStory
- ConversionRuler
For some of those you’ll pay one time (i.e. ClickTracks is $500). For others there is a monthly fee (ConversionRuler is $20 per month). However, don’t jump in for the least expensive. At first, see what your needs are, and which of these programs can bring you the best return on investment.
You can learn more about tracking in our advanced section.
You almost reached the end of our AdWords beginner section. If you got hooked by now, read on to see how you can become an AdWords expert.
If in the end this sounds too hard, or you don’t have the time to learn AdWords but still, you need to use it, learn how to hire an Google AdWords Professional.
