Finding Value in Your Conversion Data to Improve Your Campaign Success

Brittany Patterson - June 9, 2014

I often get the impression from e-commerce marketing managers that they are uncertain about which metrics to focus on when determining the performance of their Search Engine Marketing efforts.  The great news is that Google AdWords and MSN/ Bing both offer revenue and conversion reporting directly within the engines and this can really help to narrow your focus.

When a user clicks one of your search ads, Google Shopping/ Product Listing Ads, display ads, or remarketing ads, arrives on your landing page, and then completes an action, he or she is then taken to a Thank You page.

If you are already running campaigns with these engines, you should have the simple snippet of conversion tracking code placed on your site’s Thank You pages.  The conversion code should also be modified to pass the revenue value if your site is an e-commerce shop. You will have to add specific code for both Google AdWords and and Bing Ads. To learn how you can find the code for AdWords, visit the conversion tracking page on Google’s help section. For Bing’s conversion tracking code, visit the conversion tracking page on Bing’s help section.

Once you’ve added the code, you will have the ability to track how many conversions (sales, email sign ups, or form submissions, for example) are attributed to each campaign, ad group, and all the way down to the keyword level through the conversion coding.  The more relevant data you collect, the easier it is to monitor the trends over time and determine the success of each campaign.

Once you know how your ads are working, you can begin experimenting with your ads and landing pages in order to see what leads to more conversions.