Do not, I repeat do NOT allow poor conversions tracking to limit your potential for paid search success. Time and time again I stumble across businesses who spend thousands of dollars only to realize months later they could have saved thousands. The worst is having to find out that your "paid search agency" years into their campaigns have wasted a lot of money and effort trying to drive conversions off poorly measured data.
Spending money effectively in Google Ads, Bing, or even Yahoo is not an overnight job you turn on and run with. However, many marketing agencies and even large corporations suffer from poor paid search management. Why?
Because they choose to not consider the benefits of "diving deep" in the data.
Agencies poorly manage paid search accounts due to the lack of understanding how conversions correlate to their client's business KPIs. It's easy to get away with doing business by pulling data and forwarding it to your clients without having a concrete grasp of exactly what is happening in your google ads account. I attribute this issue partly due to the lack of knowledge the average business owner has about the subject matter.
I also find it very surprising that many agencies offer paid search as a service because of the ease of creating a Google ads account but lack the ability to measure and build towards paid search goals.
This combination of ill-practice leads both clients and agency owners frustrated when they depart the relationship due to poor results. The most important way to effectively manage your paid search performance should be to identify what a "true" conversion is for your business. If the conversion is a lead, the leads should be measured alongside your ad spend. I've seen many google ad accounts counting conversions off irrelevant drivers for online performance. An example of this would be an automotive dealer measuring and tracking page views as a conversion. Page views are not hard conversions! A dealership wants to sell cars and does so through collecting leads and interested buyers. Just because someone viewed a page does not mean they have the intention to purchase a car!
If you are having trouble identifying what to track on your website feel free to comment in this article below. I am a free resource to help answer this pain staking question that many businesses overlook.
Do not let yourself waste money for poor data management. With a few simple tags, the tracking on your website could provide the meaningful data your business needs to empower you and your team to drive effective results.
Above is an example of possible conversions you may track within adwords. Notice that I have included two types of conversions our call conversions and form submissions. I identify both of these as soft and hard conversions. Our "soft" conversions would be our call data as we may not have the same level of intent as our form completion.
Distinguishing intent is a very important component for tracking conversions as you will want to make sure the measure of success is worthwhile and accurate for your business.
Once you have identified which conversions will indicate high or low intent you may begin to set up tracking on site to measure performance and begin analyzing what traffic is converting. The key to all paid search work is to routinely check and analyze your performance data. If this is an area you are unsure how to go about feel free to comment or contact me below!
I work with businesses in the healthcare, automotive, and finance industry and will be more than happy to share my learnings with you.
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