PPC CONVERSION TRACKING: WHAT CAN WE MEASURE?

IF YOU’RE POURING MONEY INTO PPC (PAY PER CLICK) ADS, YOU’LL WANT TO KNOW IT’S WORKING FOR YOU, RIGHT? IF YOU’RE PAYING PER CLICK, THAT INVESTMENT BETTER BE WORTH IT… THAT’S WHERE PPC CONVERSION TRACKING COMES INTO PLAY. ESSENTIALLY, YOU NEED TO TRACK THE RATIO OF CLICKS TO CONVERSIONS (OR ENGAGEMENTS), THEN YOU WILL BE ABLE TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT YOUR CAMPAIGN IS PROFITABLE (OR IF YOU’RE JUST POURING CASH INTO A DUMPSTER FIRE).

You (or your agency) need to put in the work, though. Just adding a snippet of code to your website won’t do jack sh**. That is, UNLESS you have a proper plan to optimise your reports and performance. Below we’ll cover some of the basics, including the conversions you can (and should) track and how to use that data to adjust your campaigns and make better decisions.

UNDERSTANDING PPC CONVERSION TRACKING: THE BASICS

You can track pretty much any action taken by a user on your website when they’ve clicked on one of your ads. Of course, you can’t literally sit there and count the clicks coming in from your ads yourself (we know you know this, but we’re making a point – hang on), which is why you need to add some non-intrusive code to the site that will gather data on all user interactions that originate from your PPC ads. This is just the start. You will need to analyse how people use your site, then you need to optimise the user experience to ensure they get where they want to go (or where you need them to go) without any obstructions. This ensures that you can see the exact results of your ad spend, but also which elements are driving those results (and how they can be further tuned to improve performance).

The primary platform for all this tech wizardry is Google AdWords. It allows you to check everything from basic click metrics to advanced conversion activities (and not just on your website – if you have an app, that can be monitored too). So you won’t just see who clicks on your ad, you will also see exactly what that person does on your site and how long it takes them to do it. There are other platforms, but we’re assuming you don’t want a fat wall of text before you get to the really interesting bits of the article, so we’ll save that for later.

WHAT YOU CAN (AND SHOULD) TRACK

We’re not going to get into the minutiae of PPC. Instead, we’ll give you a short list of the stuff you can (and should) track. If you don’t want to read all this, we’ll sum it up in two words: track everything. We would have made that the subheading, but our gut feeling says it would scare people off more than it would encourage them to read through it!

While our clever two-word summary of the above bullets (track everything) covers most of what you need to know, there are still a few small bites of info we can add. In 2020, Google updated its conversion categories to have broader AND more concise options. This includes a few things not covered above, like users getting directions to your physical store (if you have one), people viewing your contact info, outbound clicks (i.e. clicking something on your site that takes them elsewhere), and even when people add stuff to carts but don’t check out. We recommend reading Google’s full article on updated conversion categories to get the whole picture (but finish reading this article first, we worked really hard on it😭).

DON’T FORGET ABOUT BING!

Not everyone likes Google. That means some users are going to search for products or services similar to yours on OTHER platforms (cue the horror music). This means you also need to run PPC ads on these platforms. Bing Ads brings some value to the table through Universal Event Tracking (UET), which captures detailed information on users’ actions (similarly to Google AdWords, which means you’ll be able to compare the two if necessary). It doesn’t really do anything different from Google AdWords (unless you count accessing different user demographics), but it does reach people who would otherwise not be tracked by that platform.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED ABOUT MEASURING SUCCESS

We can’t stress this enough: Google AdWords and Bing Ads offer a boatload of value. These tools give us a solid game plan (i.e. measurable, actionable insights – the marketer’s favourite buzzwords). We can then refine our strategies and see their direct impact, essentially allowing us to measure their success (and rinse and repeat until they are close to perfect). What we’ve learned from this is that a persistent, data-driven, and adaptive approach is needed to get the best results.

Keep an eye on our blog for more exciting and insightful blogs on PPC and other interesting topics!