How To Track Your Results

Get the Flash Player to see this Google Ads tutorial about building your keyword list.

One important milestone to turning your Google Ads ad groups into moneymakers is deciding which of them are winners and which are losers. Tracking your results can help you do just that.

In the world of PPC advertising, tracking your results is the definitive way to discover if you are making money or not. To see how your campaign really performs, you need to learn how to determine your return on investment (ROI), how to set your maximum bids, and generally how to keep a keen eye on every minute detail by using the right tools.

This article contains the basics of tracking results in your Google Ads campaigns.

Why Tracking Is Important

A little known fact of Google Ads is that nothing is ever static. Many things can and will change with every hour and every day.

Even if your Google Ads campaign doesn’t generate sales from the first day you started running it, it is still valuable to you as it will generate precious data about how the ads perform and also about the users that click on those ads. This information is important, because it will help you improve your results.

When running an Google Ads campaign the best advice to take is to never lose control. After a few weeks of running your first campaigns it’s easy to become confident, however without proper tracking you can feel like you’re doing a good job when in reality your campaign could be costing you money and not making many sales leads.

The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto described a concept that can be applied to Google Ads. Called the 80/20 rule, he wrote that 20% of inputs create 80% of outputs, and conversely 80% of inputs create only 20% of outputs. For example, on a blog, 20% of the posts will get 80% of the reader traffic.

Applied to Google Ads, it illustrates how 20% of your Google Ads campaigns will bring you 80% of your profits.

If 20% of your Google Ads ads/keywords account for 80% of your sales leads, this means that a tiny portion of your account could be more valuable to you than all your campaigns combined, figuring out what that 20% is what tracking can do for you. Figuring out why that 20% is more profitable than the other 80% is how you really reap the benefits of Google Ads.

Tracking data:

  • Helps you decided what ads and keywords to invest in.
  • Helps you better measure your overall ROI.

How Tracking Works with Google Ads

Figuring out how many users turn into customers after clicking on your ad is called conversion tracking. To start conversion tracking with Google Ads on your website it’s fairly easy, it’s simply a matter of copying and pasting a snippet of code onto a specific page on your website.

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 (this is usually the page they land on after making a purchase or signing up to a newsletter), the cookie is sent to a Google server, and registered as a successful conversion in your Google Ads account.

To find out how to setup conversion tracking you can read the “Google Ads Conversion Tracking Setup Guide“.

Google Ads conversion tracking can help you track purchases, it can track how many users requested follow-up calls for more information, give you sign-up statistics for newsletters and help you track how many times users have landed on a page on your site that is important to you. All of this can help toward determining your ROI.

Other Tracking Tools – Google Analytics

Apart from conversion tracking Google offers a further tracking tool called Google Analytics.

You can link your Google Ads and Analytics account to track visitor through your site, you can also review extra data for your ad campaigns by tracking landing page quality and conversions (goals) which will help you pick out your highest performing ads.

Google Analytics enables you to:

  • Track visitors that come back to your website.
  • Calculate the client value.
  • See exactly which ad group is winning and which one is losing money.

Remember, you can watch this and other Google Ads Tutorials on our Youtube channel too.

Further Reading: We recommend reading How To Become An Google Ads Expert next, or select from one of our growing number of tutorials below.

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