Conversion Tracking

Jason Gorham - July 7, 2010

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.