We commonly hear complaints from clients that the conversion numbers reported by Google Adwords and Google Analytics are not accurate.  Most commonly we hear:  “Google AdWords conversions don’t match my transaction log” and “the conversions in Google AdWords and the conversions in Google Analytics don’t match.”  This usually leads to distrust and frustration on the part of the advertiser.  Our standard answer is “no, they won’t match, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t accurate”

Here’s a quick explanation of how conversion reporting works in Google AdWords and Google Analytics.  Once you understand what they are tracking and how they are reporting the data, you’ll be able to look at the data in a whole new light.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking:

First click attribution:  The keyword that triggers your ad the first time the searcher visits your site will be credited with the conversion (even if they converted on a subsequent visit through a different search).  The conversion date will be recorded on the first day the searcher clicked on your ad (which may be earlier than the actual day the conversion occurred.)  This is why AdWords conversions will not match your transaction log and why the data you see for previous time periods continues to change even after that time period has passed.

30-day cookie: Google AdWords tracks a visitor for 30 days after they click on your ad.

3^rd party cookie:  Google AdWords conversion tracking uses a 3^rd party cookie, which means it’s more vulnerable to being blocked and removed.

Filters invalid clicks.  If you receive invalid clicks that have associated conversions, those conversions will be removed from your AdWords reporting.

Google Analytics:

Last click attribution.  The last keyword the searcher used to access your site when they converted is given credit for the conversion.  The conversion is recorded on the actual day of the conversion event.

6 month cookie.  By default, Google Analytics tracks a visitor for 6 months after they visit your site.

^1st party cookie.  This means it’s a bit less vulnerable to being blocked or removed.

Does not filter invalid clicks.  If you have invalid clicks that led to a conversion being recorded, they are not removed from your Analytics account.

But wait, there’s more!  Knowing only the first clicks and last clicks which led to a conversion is just a small part of the story.  What about all those clicks and impressions in between?

When you have Adwords and Google Analytics sharing data, you can see first clicks, last clicks and all the clicks and impressions in between (referred to as Assists) that resulted in a conversion on your website.  To see these reports, go to your Adwords account and select Reporting -> Conversions.  In the pane on the left-hand side click on the Search Funnels link.

There are several fantastic reports here that will show you all of the clicks and impressions, along with paths and time lags for your conversions.

Using these reports, you can easily get a picture of the role that each of your keywords play in the conversion story to make improvements that will truly improve the performance of your pay-per-click campaign.

This morning we officially announced the availability of a new call tracking feature in our Yield Web Marketing Suite for Advertisers and for Agencies through an integration with Marchex Call Analytics.  This is a feature many of our users have been eagerly awaiting so we’re pretty excited to announce that it’s live for all users.  For those who don’t know about Marchex, what this means is search marketers and their agencies can now track and optimize sales and conversions from search engine pay-per-click (PPC) ads or natural search results that lead to a telephone call as opposed to an online transaction.

For many of our users, a call to a telephone number is the conversion event inspired by their search engine ad or natural search result.  By integrating with Marchex, the leader in call analytics, search marketing professionals or their agencies managing campaigns in the Yield Web Marketing Suite are now able to effectively track and evaluate the efficacy of their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns with a call conversion event.  Many of you have told us the reason your company or agency clients love PPC advertising is the ability to effectively track ROI on campaigns, but, of course, those who’ve relied on telephone calls as the conversion event have often been frustrated at the inability to attribute those calls to the advertising source.  The Yield Software–Marchex integration eliminates this ROI tracking gap in SEM.

One of our customers, Michael Cody at Directory Assistants, Inc., was a beta-tester of the new feature and here’s the feedback he gave me:

“As specialists in search and directional marketing for small and mid-size businesses, a disproportionate number of our clients rely on calls as their conversion event for PPC advertising.  Now we’re able to effectively manage PPC campaigns across Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines on behalf of our clients while accurately attributing each conversion – no matter how those might occur – to the right campaign source.”

We’ve also included built-in reporting tools and analyses in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, so both our advertiser and agency customers now have greater visibility into the impact of your marketing initiatives, which means you can more effectively leverage SEM as a key component of your larger marketing mix.

For current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite, simply:

Login.

Click on either the Paid Search Optimizer tab.

In the Paid Search Optimizer module, click into an existing campaign or set up a new campaign.

Under “Quick Links” in the right-hand column, click on “Set Up Conversion Events”.

In the Conversion Events page, scroll down to the “Marchex Conversion Events” section and click on “Create a Marchex Conversion Event” link.

Follow the simple instructions; once your conversion event is set up, you’ll be able to track all your call conversion events in the Reports tab, along side all your other conversion event tracking data.

As always, our customer success reps are available to help you out if you questions or require assistance.  Let us know what you think of this new feature–we built it for you and hope you get great results from it.

Let’s face it: it’s typically not recommended! Though it may happen once in awhile, for most people it just doesn’t — usually for good reason.  And yet many businesses treat first visits to their websites as if they’re expecting to go all the way on a first date.

Since we all need that little thing called revenue in order to stay in business and be profitable, many businesses just focus on tracking their one main revenue-generating action as a conversion event for online activity.  Whether it’s a product purchase or generation of a lead, all online campaigns and keywords are judged by their ability to immediately result in this one conversion.

However, in this day and age of information abundance, reviews, referral sources, and the like, many searchers do lots of poking around before they are ready to take that conversion step.  There are four generally-accepted steps in the sales cycle you should keep in mind:

Ignorance — This is the phase when a person is unaware of their need of a particular product or service that might make their lives or their own business somehow better or more efficient or less expensive.

Awareness — When a customer has become aware of a need and the means of addressing it, but is still learning, investigating and preparing.

Engagement — A customer-prospect has selected your company as one that might address their need.

Investment — Success! A prospective customer becomes a paying customer.

Most people these days go through these four stages of the sales cycle.  So rather than throwing all of your eggs in one basket, hoping to convince your visitor to “go all the way” on that very first visit, we encourage you to offer different avenues to make a connection on that first visit.  This will enable you to foster the relationship and be the one the searcher comes back to when they are ready to convert.

For prospects in the “ignorance” phase, it’s important to speak to a particular pain point.  Call out that pain and the clear cure for it.  For instance, say you sell solar panels.  You may want to run PPC ads like this one:

Energy Bills High?

Solar is more affordable

than ever – learn how.

solarxyz.com/lowermybills

(Hopefully, this is a fake company… we intended it to be!)  In this instance, the ad is addressing a common customer pain point: high household energy bills.  They point out why an alternative could be viable for the searcher.  And they entice the searcher with an answer to their pain (”lower my bills”).

Next, during the “awareness” phase, think about why your searcher is likely to be hunting around gathering more information:

Are they looking for the best price?

Do they need reviews / ratings / referrals before selecting?

Are they researching a gift for someone else?

Are they sure about the exact product accessory they need?

Did they simply get interrupted in the middle of their search?

Are they not currently using the right device or computer that they intend on converting from?

Do they need to run it by someone else?

We could go on and on — there are so many different reasons why people aren’t ready to commit on the first click.  After you figure out the likely scenarios for your particular offering, you can start to think about the types of valuable information for a connection that will enable you to stick in the mind of the visitor and leave a lasting presence they will return to.

The content that you offer to make the connection will need to be unique, valuable, helpful and just plain irresistible.  Following are some additional “connection” ideas that you can try out:

Newsletter sign-up.  You’ll need to say more than just “sign up” though – for instance, does the newsletter contain offers?  What type of content is in it that will entice them or be useful to them?

Facebook / Twitter following.  Again –why would they want to do this?  Is there some enticing content from your community that you can use as a teaser?  Are there special offers you have for your social following?

Webinar sign-up.  Do you have any relevant upcoming webinars that might be of interest that you can encourage them to sign up for?

Conference sign-up.  Any upcoming conferences that you will be attending?  Perhaps you are going to have some form of a giveaway that they can sign up for.

Notification sign-up.  Can you entice them to sign-up for an email notification if there is a price changes in the future?  Or would they like to be notified of future reviews that are posted, or stock level notifications?

Third-party data.  Do you have valuable industry or market data that you can share with them – any analyst or third party reports, or review aggregations that would help guide them?

Personalized information.  Can you provide them with any information that is personalized to them?  The ROI on a purchase, help finding the right solution through a series of questions, previewing how something will look for them, analysis of something that is theirs, any form of a calculator, etc.  Make sure to capture the results so you can also email them to them.

Personal response to questions, or personal review of something.  If an expert can help guide them in a personalized, non-salesy way, this is often attractive.

Contests.  Everyone loves to win things!

Polls.  Ask them for their input on something about what you offer.  This will usually require a strong incentive – but even showing the results of an ongoing poll that you have, that they can participate in can often times be enough.

A product brochure, white paper, recent use-case video, etc.  Any content that can help them learn more about you after they go away from your website.

After you are able to make the connection, you’ll want to spend some time nurturing it.  This gets you to the “engagement” level.  Continue to reach out to the visitor on a regular basis with more unique, valuable content along the lines of the connection they made with you.  Whether it’s an updated analysis, a new notification, some interesting community content from Twitter, or some new poll results, keep the conversation going and stay fresh in their mind.

Once you’ve gotten your additional connection points in place on your landing pages and throughout your website, you’ll want to make sure you are tracking their success.  Track all the meaningful events for your online campaigns, realizing that any connection made carries value – so if you have keywords that are bringing in lots of new connections, but no immediate revenue you’ll want to keep them alive to see if your nurture-rate to revenue is high.  For each of these connection points, you’ll want to monitor how often they bring about return visits and eventually generate revenue.  This will help you know where to focus your efforts as you go forward.

All of which gets you to that “all-the-way goal”: investment.

In Part One of this article, I talked about the mistakes small business owners and marketers make when they first begin using pay-per-click campaigns. In Part Two, I cover the third biggest mistake people make: sending all PPC traffic to your home page.

Why is this a mistake? Simply put, you seriously lower conversions because you give people too many options to “explore” or you make them click around searching for the product or service featured in your ad – which usually causes them to click right back out of your site.

A better method is to send searchers to landing pages developed specifically for each ad in your campaign. “Advanced search marketers,” says our own Dudley Chamberlain, one of Yield Software’s customer success reps, “create their ad groups, ads, and landing pages at the same time. This ensures they work together.”

When developing your landing pages, you’ll want to include the same keywords, language and offer that you used in the ad. If someone is looking for a white paper on Internet Security, for example, you don’t want to send them to your home page or to a “resources” page that lists a dozen white papers, case studies, and reports.

Instead, send them to an exclusive landing page that includes the title of the white paper (the same title used in the ad), a blurb about the paper and why people should download it, an image of the white paper cover, and the registration form.

Creating landing pages that relate to your ads (and by extension keywords) has an additional benefit: it helps you receive a higher quality score.

According to Google, the “AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each keyword by looking at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and a user’s search query.”

Ad ranking is determined by multiplying the Quality Score by Max CPC. This means that if your competitor has a higher quality score, their ad can appear higher than yours – even though you may be willing to pay more per click!

(To see your Quality Score within Google Adwords, navigate to the Keywords tab, click the “Filter and views” drop down menu on the right, and then click “Customize Menus.” You’ll then see a new screen where you can then check the “Quality Score” box.)

Increasing your Quality Score – and paying less for clicks! – is why it’s important to set up ad groups for each campaign. Having ad groups allows you to test which keywords / ad copy raises or lowers your ads’ Quality Score.

In addition to assessing your ads, Google also looks at your landing pages. If your landing page doesn’t describe (or match) the keywords and copy in the ad, you get penalized with a low Quality Score.

According to PPC expert Brad Geddes, “Google thinks of searchers as their users, so they want them to have a good search experience so they come back to Google to search again.” Thus, your landing page needs to provide searchers with a good experience.

We’ve covered how to create optimized landing pages in the following posts:

Add Muscle to Your Landing Page Headlines

Landing Page Calls-to-Action that Inspire

Six Steps to Creating Compelling Landing Pages

Don’t forget, our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage and optimize your PPC campaigns and landing pages across all three search engines (not just Google). Read about how we can help you, then take our free, no risk, no obligation 30-day trial for a test drive.

Transactional landing pages have one purpose only: to get people to take one specific action, whether it’s filling out a form for a white paper, purchasing a product, or even subscribing to an e-newsletter.

Yet many companies lower landing page conversion rates by providing opportunities to browse for related goods and services or offering all kinds of back-up information to support their offer.

In other words, if you’re trying to get people to sign up for your Webinar and on your landing page you have links to your Website, YouTube video, and white papers, you’re encouraging people to click away from your landing page – perhaps never to return.

I call this “Distraction Interaction.” Think about what happens when you go online to do something:

Initially… you open your email client to send someone an important email, but first you read your new messages and find an interesting newsletter, which you click open to read.

Then… within the newsletter are a few links to blogs and articles, which you read. An industry guru wrote one of the blog posts and you see her Twitter handle, so you open TweetDeck in order to follow her and then get sucked into Twitter . . . .

An hour later… you come up for air, completely forgetting you were supposed to send your customer that important email.

This exact process is what happens when you include links to additional information on your landing page!

To significantly decrease Distraction Interaction and increase conversions for various types of landing pages, consider the following tips:

Eliminate ALL links to your Website, blog, etc. – Eliminating links discourages people from clicking off your landing page and falling into a rabbit hole on your Website. If you want people to visit your site, give them a link on the “thank you” page once the transaction is complete.

Keep forms simple – A MarketingSherpa report on white papers revealed that people do not want to fill out long, complicated forms. On another note, have people outside your company test your forms before they’re live; you want to ensure they work smoothly and that your spam filter isn’t gobbling up the response emails.

Focus on one objective – The objective of the landing page is to get people to do one thing. Whatever your objective, ensure all landing page components support that objective, from the headline and body copy to the design and graphics.

Don’t “bait and switch” – If you’re using PPC, SEO, or other “inbound” methods to get people to the landing page, make sure the headline and the offer match what people are expecting to get. Nothing is worse than getting to a landing page that’s offering something completely different then what the ad copy proclaimed.

Include a “hero shot” – If you’re offering a product, white paper or other tangible item, include a graphic of the cover, a headshot of the Webinar presenter, or a photo of the item.

Once you have these elements in place, you can then begin testing headlines, images, form and copy to see what increases or decreases conversions, some of which we’ll cover in subsequent posts to this one.  And remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a landing page optimization module that enables real-time multivariate tests of landing pages. Our wizard takes you step-by-step through a process of creating test pages from your original; serves different versions as people click on links to your landing page; and automatically begins to favors the page that converts best overtime, improving your conversion rates in real time.

Do you have other suggestions for improving landing page conversions? Send us a tweet via Twitter at @YieldSW.