Important Changes to how Google AdWords Tracks Conversions

Google AdWords is going through some major changes currently. There is a new version of the inter­face due to be released very soon, and now they are plan­ning to make quite a substan­tial change to how they track conver­sions to make it much more granular.

Please see the below expla­na­tion from Google for details on how this will impact your campaigns and report­ing, once this is implemented:

We know differ­ent campaign goals often require differ­ent success metrics. If you want to drive online purchases, you prob­a­bly look at the total number of sales, so if one person buys three items from your web site, you’d want to count three sales. But if you’re measur­ing leads, you may care more about unique leads, so if the same person fills out a lead form three times on your site, you’d want to count them only once.

To make it easier for you to manage campaigns with a vari­ety of adver­tis­ing goals, in the coming months we’re updat­ing AdWords conver­sion track­ing metrics in the new AdWords inter­face and other AdWords account manage­ment plat­forms (such as AdWords Editor and the AdWords API).

Today we’ve taken the first step by clar­i­fy­ing the conver­sion termi­nol­ogy on the AdWords Report Center and conver­sion track­ing tool pages. “Conver­sions” columns are now labeled Conver­sions (1-per-click), while “Trans­ac­tions” columns are now called Conver­sions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign manage­ment pages display 1-per-click conver­sions, so if one click leads to multi­ple conver­sions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conver­sions count each conver­sion that occurs after a click on your ad.

Here’s an exam­ple to explain the differ­ence: Let’s say you’re sell­ing garden­ing supplies online and you’ve set up conver­sion track­ing on your “Thank You For Your Purchase” and your “Newslet­ter Subscrip­tion Confirmed” pages.

If a customer clicks on your ad, buys a bag of peat moss, then subscribes to your newslet­ter, you’ll see two many-per-click conver­sions, but just a single 1-per-click conver­sion in your account. If the same customer returns to your site a few days later and buys a trowel (but doesn’t click on one of your AdWords ads to get there), you’ll now see three many-per-click conver­sions, but your 1-per-click conver­sions will still remain at one.

By focus­ing on many-per-click conver­sions, you may be able to more easily compare AdWords campaign perfor­mance with the perfor­mance of your other online adver­tis­ing campaigns, since a large number of online ad serv­ing and search campaign manage­ment tools (such as DART for Search) use many-per-click conver­sions as the default conver­sion metric.

You can learn more about the new termi­nol­ogy, as well as get guid­ance on when to use each of the differ­ent conver­sion metrics to measure success, in this Help Center arti­cle.

Over time these metrics will also be released to AdWords Editor, the AdWords API, and the new AdWords inter­face. We’ll also improve conver­sion track­ing for display adver­tis­ers through the release of view-through conver­sion track­ing for campaigns on the Google Content Network.