What’s the difference between a novice airline pilot and a veteran? An expert will tell you that a novice relies on their sight and gut instinct while an experienced professional relies on instruments. It’s no different in marketing. A true professional should never be led forward solely by his gut or blind faith. You always want to make solid decisions based on hard data and one of the ways Google AdWords makes that possible is through conversion tracking.
Conversions can mean different things depending on the type of business you run, but when you’re running Google ads, there are three basic types of conversions you’ll want to consider in order to gauge the success of your campaigns.
• Track when someone lands on a specific page
• Track when someone calls you after seeing your ad or visiting your site
• Track conversions that happen offline
1. Track When Someone Lands on a Specific Page
This is one of the most basic forms of conversion tracking and it’s especially important if you run an e-commerce business and want to track how users progress through a series of pages that lead to a sale. Or maybe you just want to track people who land on a thank you page after signing up for your newsletter. It’s definitely worth knowing how to set up, and it’s pretty straightforward. In the top right of your AdWords account, click on Tools & Settings and then under the Measurement tab click on Conversions, which will take you to a dashboard where you can set it up.
2. Track When Someone Calls You After Seeing Your Ad or Visiting Your Site
Putting your phone number in a Google ad is a strategy that works. A survey of 3,000 mobile searchers by Google in 2013 showed that 70 percent of mobile users click to call businesses directly from a Google search. And best of all it’s easy to track, which means that you won’t be flying blind.
One of the main ways that advertisers add phone numbers to their ads is by using call extensions. We don’t recommend using ads with call extensions if you want to drive calls because users can often be distracted by everything else around the phone number. The best thing to do is to have the ad focus exclusively on driving a call and there are two ways you can do this:
• Call-Only Ads: These ads appear only in mobile searches and are designed solely to get the user to call directly from the ad.
They are one of the trickiest types of ad campaign to run because you’ll have to know what kinds of users are likely to call from an ad. But they generate the most ROI because once the user clicks the ad, it automatically calls your business.
• Number on Your Website: If someone clicks over to your website from one of your Google ads, you can track phone calls that happen as a result of that ad visit. The copy in these ads should also be designed to prompt the user to make that call further on down the funnel. You’ll want to filter out people who aren’t likely to make a call through the wording in your copy. To use this conversion method, you’ll need to manually install code on your website to allow Google to track the phone calls. If you’re not a web developer, you’ll either need one to help you with this or be proficient enough with Google Tag Manager to do it yourself.
3. Track When Conversions Happen Offline
Sometimes a lead doesn’t directly result in a conversion, but instead takes the customer down a path where the sale happens either over a phone line that isn’t being tracked in Google or in person. You can track these conversions by importing offline conversions into Google.
Google Ads offers three options to track offline conversions:
A) Google Ads Conversion Import lets you add data that you’ve collected from offline transactions into Google. If you’re using some other system to track phone calls or in person sales, you can import that data into Google Ads.
B) If you’re using Salesforce as your CRM, Google has a special feature that allows you to see when a conversion that you track in Salesforce happened as a result of a Google ad click.
C) Zapier is an app that allows you to track information across your various applications and properties. Google lets you automatically import Zapier’s offline conversion tracking so that you can send all your offline tracking information right to Google.
