5 Conversion Tips for Ad Tracking

Nowadays, Google AdWords offers a ton of features, and mastering them all has a learning curve. For that reason, there is a number of known challenges in ad tracking when running various pay-per-click campaigns.

Today, we want to present 5 possibilities to kick-start your conversion tracking.
1. Track and Integrate Your Click-to-Call Ads
If you’ve been running any sort of AdWords campaigns on mobile then you know how tough it can be to track conversions effectively.
Right now, you can integrate your conversion tracking for click-to-call ads in your standard conversion column. Google will take notice of this data when setting your bids.
With this recent update, Google has made it significantly easier to track calls as conversions and report them in AdWords.
2. Use a CRM to Track Conversions
For the most part, the conversion tracking mechanism in AdWords works fine, as long as you make most of your commissions immediately after someone clicks one of your ads.
But if you also used offline channels that required you to follow up with the person after the initial click then, in the past, such conversions were impossible to report.
Now, however, AdWords allows you to report conversions individually if you have the gclid parameter of the original click (the click ID). There are some CRMs that provide integration with AdWords that allow you to input the gclid and thus, track any offline conversions you generate.
3. Keep Conversion Delays in Mind
One of the first things that everyone should know about conversions in AdWords is that the date of the conversion is associated with the date of the ad’s impression, not the date the actual conversion took place.
Not realizing this can make your reporting a lot more difficult. If you, for example, compare two periods of time against one another and see that one of them has significantly better results, you might get tricked into thinking that there’s something wrong with your campaign. When in fact, the cause of such a situation might be that some of the conversions haven’t managed to trickle in yet.
4. Be Careful When Tracking Conversions in Google Analytics
You can track your conversions pretty effectively in both AdWords and Analytics, but the thing with Analytics’ data is that it comes in with a bit more delay.
On the other hand, the reporting engine in Analytics is  more powerful than that in AdWords, so as always, you gain some and you lose some with both platforms.
5. Conversion Optimizer is One of the More Effective and Easy to Use Tools
Although it’s good to have your finger on the pulse and work with your metrics actively, sometimes, the automatic tools provided inside AdWords can bring you better effects.
For instance, Conversion Optimizer has been designed to provide automatic bidding based on real-time factors. When defining your exact bids for the moment, it goes through a lot of different data, like the time, day, location, the structure of the query itself, and more.
You can try working with manual bid modifiers at all times when constructing your campaigns, but if you’re working with multiple variables then it’ll quickly start costing you too much effort and time to get this set up right.