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Conversion tracking is one of the most valuable tools Google AdWords provides its users to get an accurate picture of the actual return on their advertising investment.

Installing and using conversion tracking data appropriately is vital for the success of any AdWords campaign.

Remember that having great metrics such as a high CTR, Avg. Position, and a low Avg. CPC doesn’t mean anything if your bottom line is not benefiting from it.

Once you have the conversion tracking installed and tested out to see if it’s actually tracking, you should let it run in order to gather valuable data, which would be very helpful to optimize your campaigns.

Depending on the traffic of your campaign, in about two to three weeks you could have enough data to work with. And therefore, it would be the right time to start developing strategies to optimize your campaign and increase your overall conversions as well as your conversion rate.

To help you achieve the goal of improving your cost per conversion, here are a few tips and ideas you could implement in your campaigns.

1) Review Your Search Terms Report from Current or Old AdWords Campaigns

If you go to your campaign keywords you can then click on details and download a search terms report. This report will reveal the actual search queries that potential clients have typed on Google before clicking on the ads.

By taking a look at these search terms, you could identify the ones that resulted in conversions. If they’re relevant and have enough search volume you should consider including them as part of your keyword list.

This would be a sort of “win-win” situation as you could include keywords that have already shown their effectiveness in terms of generating conversions, plus they will most likely have lower avg. CPC due to their superior relevancy and Quality Score.

In consequence, it is a good strategy to add keywords with conversions from the search terms in order to increase your conversion rate and to also lower your overall campaign’s cost per conversion through higher ad relevance and better control of bids.

2) Include Keywords Match Types That Convert

When you take a look at your search terms, remember to take the time to analyze which match type your keywords have converted in. This is important to determine if you’re planning to change the current match types for your active campaigns to be more in line with the way people tend to search online for your products or services.

Let’s assume you’re running a Real Estate company in Broad match modifier (BMM), but when evaluating your search terms you notice that most of your keywords with conversions are in either exact or phrase match types.

After seeing that trend, you should reconsider your campaign’s match type selection strategy, and consider including exact and phrase match as the main match types for your campaign.

This will usually result in a better conversion rate as your keywords will be very similar to the way people word their search on Google before they actually find your text ad. This could also help to improve your campaign’s CTR as your keywords would be more relevant.

Since CTR is one of the main ingredients Google takes into consideration when calculating Quality Score, by improving your campaigns’ CTR you will also get additional benefits. And as Google repeatedly states, the better your Quality Score is, the less you would have to pay per click, which will also help you lower the cost per conversion.

3) Evaluate The Conversion Rate of Your Text Ads

A good optimizing strategy is to take a careful look at your campaign ads to determine which ones are being the most effective at generating conversions.

As a best practice, you should always include at least two ads per ad group. You could try out different headlines, calls to action, descriptions and landing pages for your ads, and perform A/B split testing on all of them. By doing so, you will have a better chance to develop and fine-tune your ads in order to improve your conversions and your conversion rate.

Now, going back to the real estate campaign example, and assuming you’ve allowed at least a month worth of conversion data to be gathered, so you could start optimizing your ads to increase your conversion rate.

If you take a look at each ad group’s ads, you will probably find out that some have better performance than others.

To optimize your ads with conversion tracking data, you should take a look at your ad groups individually to determine which ad is performing the best.

Let’s assume that one of your ad groups has two ads, and this is how the stats are doing for the last 3 months:

Here you can see that all metrics seem to be doing ok, CTR is very close, avg. CPC is almost the same, etc. But, if you didn’t have conversion tracking in this case, it would be hard to determine which one is the best performing.

Now, let’s take a look at the key metric, which is the ads conversion rate: Ad No. 1 has a conversion rate of 0.68% and Ad No. 2 has a 1.29% conversion rate. There is quite a big difference between the two ads, which clearly sets Ad No. 2 apart as the best one for this ad group.
Here you can see that all metrics seem to be doing ok, CTR is very close, avg. CPC is almost the same, etc. But, if you didn’t have conversion tracking in this case, it would be hard to determine which one is the best performing.

If you take into consideration that the ads were being served almost on an equal basis, this would also give you an idea as to how many conversions you were probably missing by showing Ad No. 1 instead of your top-performing one.

To optimize your ads and improve your conversion rate you should pause Ad No.1 and leave only ad No.2 active in the ad group.

Another alternative would be to create an ad copy variation similar to ad No. 2 and test out different titles or calls to action to continue with your A/B testing process.

4) Study The Dimensions Tab

By taking a look at your dimensions tab, you could find out important information about your campaign performance.

Let’s say you’re running your campaign 24/7, but when you evaluate your dimensions you notice that at certain hours of the day you’re not getting any conversions. Here, you should consider pausing the campaign at those hours that historically have shown not to convert, as it would lower your cost per conversion by only showing your ads at better-performing hours.

By doing this, you would save your daily budget to only use it to run your ads at the most profitable time of the day. Running your ads at these times will ideally help reduce your cost per conversion and increase your conversion rate over time.

If you also notice that on Saturdays your campaign has very low conversion rates and a subsequently high cost per conversion, then you should consider lowering your bids or even pausing the campaign on Saturdays, as it might not be the best day to run ads for your industry or your particular business.

Utilizing dimensions tab data to optimize your campaign can be a great way to not only reduce your campaign cost per conversion but to also fine-tune it in order to increase your conversion rate.

5) Use Enhanced Bidding and Conversion Optimizer

Google AdWords has a couple of automated settings you could also try out to increase your conversion rate.

If you go to your campaign settings and to Bid Strategy you’ll find the Enhanced CPC setting. This bidding option will use historical conversion data to hopefully increase your conversions and thus improve your conversion rate in the process.

According to Google, enhanced CPC basically increases your bid up to 30% for “clicks that seem more likely to lead to a conversion and lower your bids for clicks that seem less likely to convert.”

Another automated bidding setting you could try out is CPA bidding or conversion optimizer.

To qualify for this conversion optimizer, your campaign would be required to have had at least 15 conversions during the last 30 days in order to allow AdWords to have enough historical conversion data to work with.

With this bidding option, you basically set up a Cost per Acquisitions (CPA bidding) for each of your campaign’s ad groups. The CPA bidding will automatically manage your individual keyword data and bids to increase them for those keywords with more conversions. This will help you reduce time when optimizing your campaign.

Of course, before you set up CPA bidding you have to make sure your cost per conversion is already at an acceptable level. It’s not a great idea to set up CPA bidding for your campaign if your current conversion cost is too high.

When setting up these automated bidding options, always remember to keep a close eye on your campaign to make sure the conversion rate and the cost are improving.

Now It’s Your Turn – Implement These Strategies and Get Better Conversion Rates

By implementing some of these strategies you should be able to increase your campaign’s conversion rate, lower your cost per conversion, and increase your business ROI.

Increasing your campaign’s ROI will help you make better use of your budget and achieve your overall online advertising goals