Learn How Google AdWords Flexible Conversion Counting Works

By Jignesh Gohel - February, 27th 2014

As a business owner, it is important that you have count of every sale generated through click campaigns. As opposed to the previous conversion tools, flexible conversion counting comes with conversion columns registering converted clicks. This will help business owners understand relative values that each click generated.

Learn about conversion count setting

Before you read further, make sure you already implemented conversion tracking in Google adwords. If not, go to tools and click on conversion and follow the process. For more information, check out below screenshot of conversion setting and implementation of conversion count. (Make sure you properly implemented how you want to count your conversion using this method).

Google continues with multiple ways to track conversions and the choice will depend upon individual conversion action. Here a better way to understand the flexible conversion counting:

Unique conversions: This setting allows counting unique conversions after a click is made on your ads. If you aren’t just interested in total number of sales but the overall activity of visitors, you should choose this setting.

Example:

If you are selling IT services and you are having different conversions for each technology you are selling. It may happen that a single person sends quote request for Magento design, Magento development and wordpress design.

In this case, you will see only 2 unique conversions instead of 3.

All conversions: If you want to track the overall conversion make by user after they click on your ads, you should go with all conversions setting.

Example:

In the same case scenario explained in unique conversion example, all conversion setting will give 3 conversions.

You can choose option based on your marketing goal and conversion types. This choice will reflect in your campaign reporting and you will accordingly see the conversion counts.

As today’s shoppers seek multiple ways to stay connected, entertained and communicate, there could be better results if business owners dig into their behavior. Studies have shown that 90% of online shoppers move between devices for all activities ranging from shopping gifts to booking air ticks and hotel rooms. Google adwords provides different tools to track such conversions to have a complete picture of their store visits, phone calls, website sales, purchases made after visiting online forums and visiting competing stores. Getting a closer insight into this purchasing behavior can help optimize advertising and arrange budgets more efficiently.

With this new conversion count option, you will “converted clicks” and “conversions” column in your Campaign reporting. (If you can’t find these column, go to column tab and click on customize column and choose the column from conversion tab.

What if businesses aren’t encouraged for a change?

If you choose to stick to the basic layout, the final reports will simply show the different column names. The conversions “many-per-click” will be renamed just “Conversions” and “one-per-click” will be renamed “Converted Clicks”. The numbers will look the same till you decide to make a change in your settings (upgrade).

Now that Google AdWords has brought about these changes, If you are having any downloadable or saved reports, you will have to update by visiting report section. The “Update Now” button is rightly displayed on the top of report page. In case the user is operating on software that requires column names, the software fields need to be updated before the reports are generated. Keeping the old column names will only be offered for a limited period now.

Important notes

• If you are having application download as conversion, it will be considered as unique conversion
• “Converted Clicks” can be segmented with conversion actions – an ad click might follow multiple conversion action

What is the impact of this flexible conversion count?

To understand the difference, let me take on example. You are selling car insurance and on Monday your website has 1000 unique visitors from Google adwords campaign. From these 1000 visitors, 100 are converted and each filled 3 different forms from different providers. Here we estimate that around 9% visitors are not tracked correctly due to different devices.

Here is the statistical comparison of previous and current conversion tracking option

Previously, Google adwords column displaying:

• Conversions (many-per-click): 273 (9% were not tracked properly X 3 forms filled by each visitors)
• Conversions (1-per-click): 91
• Est. total conv.: 300 (This will include cross device conversion estimation too)

Now, when we choose to count unique leads, we will see:

• Conversions: 91
• Converted clicks: 91
• Est. total conv.: 300 (includes cross-device estimates)

Here is the screenshot of one adgroup reporting window with this flexible conversion count option.

Official video published by Google adwords team to explain how this conversion count will work.

Additional resources:

• Google adwords blog post on flexible conversion count
• Detailed Google adwords guide

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/beantin/