Small Business Center

You Need PPC Conversion Tracking!

May 13th, 2009 by Josh Summerhays

One of the great things about Pay Per Click marketing is the ability to easily measure its effectiveness at driving sales for your business. Sadly, many small businesses begin PPC campaigns having been attracted by its claims of efficiency and transparency only to neglect the critical step that makes this possible – installing conversion tracking code.

There are many conversion tracking options when it comes to PPC management. Each major search engine provides its own code that will enable you to track sales from PPC campaigns on that search engine. Many third party systems and PPC service providers, such as OrangeSoda [wink wink], have developed their own codes as well.

What does conversion tracking code do exactly? How does it work?

When properly installed on your website, conversion tracking (hereafter “CT”) code will show you when a sale or lead is produced and which keyword and text ad helped produce the sale/lead.

CT code also allows you to see how much each sale/lead is costing you at various levels of detail in your campaign, from a high-level campaign view all the way down to the performance of individual keywords and text ads.

Many PPC systems even allow you to assign revenue figures to certain sales so that you can track ROI more accurately and adjust your campaigns according to what is driving the most profit for your business.

Why is conversion tracking so important?

Without conversion tracking, you are almost certainly wasting money in your PPC campaign somewhere. Even if you think you are getting a healthy sales volume from PPC, it’s highly unlikely that every keyword in your campaign is producing sales, let alone cost-effectively. You can trim wasted spending by identifying unproductive keywords and eliminating them from your campaign.

Even for keywords that bring in sales, many do not produce sales cost-effectively and need bid adjustments or better text ads to improve the performance of those keywords. Conversion tracking makes this possible.

Conversely, many keywords produce so well that you want to dedicate a large portion of your PPC budget to them. CT allows you to identify these keywords and optimize their performance.

If you don’t have conversion tracking codes set up with your PPC campaigns, make it happen today! You might be surprised at what you learn as a result, but your business’s bottom line will thank you!

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