It's often said that "content is King". I agree with that statement but would add that if content is King then tracking must come in a very close second or even as an equal to content.

Careful tracking, and intelligent use of the data, can make the difference between success and failure in your ppc campaigns.

It's that important!

What is conversion tracking then?

Good question.

In on-line pay per click (PPC) advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on one of your ads leads directly to some user behavior that you set have as being valuable.

This behavior could commonly be a purchase, an optin, or sometimes a view of one of your pages.

Google has developed a neat tool that measures these conversions, which will ultimately help you identify how effective your AdWords ads and keywords are for you. The tool is called "Conversion Tracking".

This is how conversion tracking works when it has been correctly set up.

Conversion tracking places a cookie on a user's computer when they click on one of your Google AdWords ads. Then, if they reach one of your conversion pages, that cookie is connected to your web page.

Making sense?

When a match is made, Google records a successful conversion for you and this will show up in your google reports.

Google's cookies generally last 30 days.

When you have access to conversion data in your google adwords reports, you can then make smarter online advertising decisions, particularly about what ads and keywords you invest your hard earned money in.

The great thing about Google's tracking is that it's free!

With this detailed data that you can easily get with adwords conversion tracking, you can then better measure your overall return on investment (ROI) for your AdWords campaigns.

ROI is the key indicator that indicates the value to your business gained in return for the cost of your ad campaign, in other words it indicates how much profit or loss you are returning.

For example, let's say you own an online business that sells a 'how to build a guitar' eBook. You would obviously know how many clicks your AdWords campaign gets, but wouldn't you like to also know specifically which keywords are converting to sales for your guitar campaign?

Conversion tracking allows you to quickly and easily get this information.

I would suggest you take the tracking one step further and set up your conversion tracking to report the actual dollar amount of each sale and get the total revenue generated by 'each of your keywords' as compared to the total cost of the keyword.

So for example, with your guitar campaign conversion statistics, let's say you discovered that the phrase matched keyword phrase "learn to make a guitar" had a return on investment (ROI) of 150 %, you could then optimize your campaign by increasing the spend on that particular keyword, thus maximizing your ROI.

This is very powerful information and believe me when I tell you that most PPC marketers do not utilize conversion tracking fully.

As part of your PPC campaign management, you'll want to keep track of just about every different type of metric you can.

One guru I look up to is John Reese, and he impressed upon me many years ago the absolute importance and power of tracking and tweaking and I have been addicted to it ever since.

All tracking, but particularly conversion tracking, is truly worth your time and is reliant upon your ability to make good decisions based upon good information.

What I mean, is that unless you analyze and do something with the tracking data, its wasted effort. Some thought and intelligent action after looking at your conversion tracking reports, can help boost your PPC success.

So in summary, conversion tracking is a powerful free tool available on Google AdWords that every adwords advertiser should be using.

I have put a video together that details how to set up your conversion tracking.

All the best for now.