Eliminate keywords that generate lots of costly clicks but never result in a sale or signup. Getting rid of non-performing clicks is essential to managing your adwords campaigns for maximum results at minimum cost.

Set up Google Adwords conversion tracking to tell you exactly which clicks you bid on actually resulted in a purchase. Note: this technique can also be used for inquiries, file downloads, filling out a form or whatever the goal of your web pages may be.

Here’s how conversion tracking would work:

Let’s say you are spending $10/day on Google Adwords and generating 20 clicks per day. Your cost for each click is $0.50.

Imagine you are bidding on two keywords… Keyword 1 is getting three times the click activity as Keyword 2. If all clicks are created equal then Keyword 1 appears to be the winner.

What are visits generated by Keyword 1 doing once they get on your site? Who knows… right? At this stage of the scenario most Adwords users simply take the average conversion rate for the whole site to “guesstimate” what kind of revenue those paid clicks are generating.

Find out what visitors to your site are actually doing

Set up “conversion pages” within your Google Adwords account and you can know exactly how many sales or signups you are getting from each keyword. It’s fairly easy to do and well worth your while.

Simply go to the reporting tab area of your Adwords account follow the step by step instructions, copy the tracking code, and paste it into the HTML of  your goal page… not too hard!

Now let’s look at our scenario with conversion tracking in place:

Keyword 1 is costing $7.50 per day for 15 clicks and generating 1 sale. Keyword 2 is costing $2.50 per day for 5 clicks and generating 1 sale. If the values of the sales are constant then we are making a lot more profit from Keyword 2… but Keyword 1 is eating up most of the daily budget!

Let’s use this tracking information and stop bidding on Keyword 1.

Now, instead of spending $10 to make $10 we are spending $10 to make $30… nice work!

I am constantly amazed at how few Google Adwords users put this simple, easy-to-do tracking feature into play. But if you are running an Adwords campaign you really should take the time to put conversion tracking into play. It can help you better allocate your dollars for maximum effect and profit.

If you know a little about HTML the entire process can be executed in a half an hour or so. If you are interested I would be happy to take a look at your campaign and show you how Google conversion tracking could work for you.