When you’re running a pay per click advertising campaign, it’s absolutely critical that you’re able to reliably track the conversions that you’re making. If you can’t track conversions then it’s very difficult to tell which of your adverts are performing best and delivering the highest return on your investment. Fortunately, there are many software products and bolt-ons that allow you to track all sorts of conversions from your PPC campaigns. In this article, we’ll take a look at five absolutely essential PPC conversion tracking tools that are useful in all sorts of situations.
Google Analytics
It might seem obvious, but before you start playing around with some of the fancier tracking tools that we’re going to discuss, it’s worth taking a little time to ensure that your Analytics account is set up properly and giving you results that you can rely on. If you have another tool that tracks the number of conversions that your website is producing, for example, your e-commerce software, then compare the number of conversions it sees with what Google Analytics thinks is happening. Whilst it can be tricky to make the numbers totally match, you should be careful of any major discrepancies.
Depending on how you have set up your analytics tracking, even fairly minor changes to the way your website is set up can throw out the tracking. For example, if you’re using button text to identify your conversion goals, then running an A/B test in which you change the text on the button could play havoc with your Analytics results. Make checking the integrity of the results a major part of your schedule.
ResponseTap
Google Analytics starts to struggle once activity moves off your website. If you have a more complex sales-funnel that, for instance, allows people to call in and make their purchase or allows for face-to-face meetings between your sales team and potential clients, then you’ll need other tools in the mix in order to discover what your true conversion rate is.
One of these tools is ResponseTap, which does a number of clever things to let you see how well your AdWords campaign is performing. Not only will it let you see which search terms are driving phone calls as Google Analytics does, but it will allow your sales team to assign a value to every call that is made. That means that you’ll be able to see which search terms and keywords are actually driving sales for your business, allowing you to optimize your advertising spend based on actual sales and results rather than more nebulous notions such as click-through rate.
Bizible
If you’re using a complex CRM system such as Salesforce or Hubspot, then it’s essential that you use a tool like Bizible to measure the quality of your leads. Bizible can feed Google Analytics type data into your CRM. Again, this allows you to look at the adverts that are sending traffic your way throughout the sales process. Instead of simply looking at which ads generate leads for you, you’ll be able to examine which adverts actually generate sales for you and even know which ones generate the most valuable sales. This type of information should be an essential part of your PPC campaign – if you’re not able to make use of it, then it’s worth talking to an experienced PPC agency about either going on a training course or getting some outside help in on a semi-regular basis to make sure you’re using the information that is at your fingertips to make improvements to your online campaigns.
Pardot
This is one for the slightly bigger companies, but a search tool like Pardot can be a great way of actually understanding the activity that goes on on your website and the stages at which people are actually deciding to buy.
If you’re selling high-value products and services, then it’s likely that the conversion process is actually much more complex than someone coming to your website and putting an item in their cart. There’s every chance that they’ll come to and from your website multiple times before making a decision on what to buy. They may also make organic searches or click-through from emails as part of the purchasing stream.
Pardot will allow you to see all of this activity and place a value on it. This is important if it looks like your PPC ads aren’t directly driving conversions on your website. It may well be the case that people first find out about your business via a PPC ad but go away to do a little more personal research before making the decision to contact you or make their first purchase. Without a more complex lead tracking tool such as Pardot, you’ll be in the dark about this sort of info and will struggle to make effective decisions.
Store visit conversions
This is a new AdWords tool that is only available to certain advertisers, but it will change the way you look at your advertising if you’re a bricks and mortar retailer. This service allows you to register a conversion when a potential customer clicks on your ad and then walks into a physical location. If you’re a restaurant or other local business then this is probably the main way that you serve customers and, until now, it’s been very difficult to properly quantify the impact your advertising has had on the people that walk into your store.
As with all other forms of ad tracking, it’s essential that you keep Google up to date on any changes or moves to your physical business. You don’t want to be registering conversions when someone walks into one of your rivals.
Hopefully, this article has given you a good overview of the tools that are out there that can help you track conversions more effectively. It’s a key part of really making the most of your Google AdWords campaign and without the data, you’re not running the best PPC advertising campaign you could be.
