Google says a View-through conversion happens when a customer sees an image or rich media ad on the Google Display Network, then later returns to your site through a bookmark an organic listing or direct URL and completes a conversion on your site. A View-through conversion is different from a click-through conversion in that a click-through conversion happens when a visitor previously clicked on an ad and then completed a conversion on your site.

In addition, because a visitor did not click on the ad but then later went to your site and converted, if you are using a cost-per-click (CPC) model for your AdWords campaign, theoretically, it did not cost you anything to receive this conversion.

View-through conversions will only occur for campaigns opted into the Google Display Network and using image ads.  That being said, campaigns utilizing Remarketing are more likely to receive View-through conversions, because the visitor is already acquainted with your site and when he/she sees an image ad reminding him/her of your site’s products or services, the visitor is more likely to return to your site and convert.

Please note that conversion tracking must be in place in your AdWords account to see both View-through and click-through conversions and View-through conversions must be enabled. To enable View-through conversions, go to the “Advanced tab” underneath the “Tools and Analysis”. See screen shot below:

For more information on View-through conversions, click here.

With the recent update to Google’s algorithm, designed to improve their search results and punish content farms, SEO has been a hot topic.  I get many industry newsletters each week and the majority are discussing topics related to Social Media, but SEO has seen a nice bump in awareness given Google’s recent update in late February.  However, companies who focus too much on how their website performs in the Google index can miss the most important aspect of their internet presence.  How well does the website perform when someone actually visits the site?  Regardless of the source of traffic (organic, paid, referral, or direct) your site’s ability to convert visitors into customers relies more on usability than your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Think about your site’s performance in terms of visitor engagement.  Do many visitors leave after viewing only one page (in other words, do you have a high bounce rate)?  Is there a statistically significant percentage of visitors who view many pages per visit but never complete the desired call to action on your site?  Testing different colors, images and page layouts can help determine the best website design to convert your visitors to customers.  While it way seem elementary to test a blue background versus a white one, you may be surprised to see how even subtle changes can increase your site’s performance.

An excellent way to leverage your visitor’s interaction and help increase the performance of your site is through usability experiments.  Google Website Optimizer (GWO) is an easy to set up (and free) tool that allows you to test different page layouts, images, and color schemes to determine which best leads to a desired result.  Moving an image from the right hand side of the page to the left may be just the change needed to increase conversions.  Using bullet points instead of paragraph text may help lower a page’s bounce rate.  There could be hundreds of different combinations in which to layout your pages and test which performs best.  Think about your site’s usability and the user experience while you are reviewing your next traffic report.  The changes you make to increase your site’s performance should be born from usability experiments rather than how well your site ranks in the SERPs or the volume of traffic your site receives.

While running an internal campaign for mobile website development, I stumbled upon an issue that I can imagine many people are having besides me.  The issue is conversion tracking when a user is not filling out the form on the page that you are sending them to. 

In this case, we are driving visitors to our mobile landing page development form and requesting them to fill it out.  After a user clicks on the ad and is driven to the landing page and doesn’t fill out the form, but performs another action on the site, would that constitute a conversion?  Any visitor that comes from a cpc ad and completes any action on a website (not necessarily the one you wanted them to do) and has conversion tracking code implemented, will show up as a conversion from the original cpc source. 

So if you’re targeting a user to complete a sale, and they fill out a form for a newsletter, then your Adwords account will still show a conversion.  Adwords conversion tracking won’t follow a user around your website (unlike retargeting that will place a cookie on the browser), so any action that has conversion tracking will capture that as a conversion.  One way you can verify what conversion is being completed is to set up goals within Google Analytics.  By cross referencing your cpc campaign with your analytics account, you can find out who completed what goal and attribute the goal to the conversion.  If you use both of these tools in-conjunction, you will be able to pinpoint with accuracy where your conversions are coming from.