Google Advertising Tools

Chapter 12. AdWords Reporting and Conversion Tracking

If you have only a handful of Campaigns and Ad Groups to keep track of, the Campaign Summary window (explained in Chapter 11) should work fine. But once you are tracking a dozen or more Campaigns, each containing multiple ads and many keywords, in order to retain your sanity—and do a good job of tracking your spending and performance with the multiple campaigns and ads—you’ll need to take advantage of the excellent AdWords reporting facility.

Conversion tracking means implementing a mechanism that tells you when visitors to your site perform a specified action. More specifically, if you are paying for advertising on a CPC basis, unless you are just interested in drawing eyeballs to your site, you’d probably like to know if this traffic brings you revenue.

Using AdWords conversion tracking , you can add code to your web pages that lets you determine if traffic generated by AdWords converts, to see if that traffic performs an action you want to have happen, such as making a purchase, leaving contact information, signing up for a subscription, or visiting a particular page.

This chapter explains how to use AdWords reports , and how to get started with AdWords conversion tracking.

Using AdWords Reports

To create a report, go to the Reports tab of the AdWords application. The Create Report window, shown in Figure 12-1, will open.

Kinds of Reports

There are seven kinds of prebuilt reports available, in addition to a custom report facility ...