Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Google AdWords Cross-Account Conversion Tracking

If you’ve been managing PPC campaigns for years, you are well aware that the best way to manage and measure PPC campaigns is to run them with conversion tracking. It’s so easy to get used to the same old method and manage conversion tracking for accounts individually. However, cross-account conversion tracking in AdWords (managed carefully) is an efficient way to track multiple AdWords accounts using a single conversion code snippet. 

Before you can use this feature, you need to create a My Client Center (MCC) account for creating conversions that you can use across your accounts.  If this is new to you, you should set up cross-account conversion tracking - it makes more sense to manage hundreds of accounts this way! Keep in mind is that once you switch to using MCC level conversion tracking, it will trump your account level conversion tracking. You’ll immediately notice that the conversion action you previously set up in an individual account becomes inactive. Why do I want to make an emphasis on this? Let me explain.

One of our client’s goals is to track when a user clicked on an ad and made a call using a dynamic number on the website. We decided to create a cross-account conversion action “Calls from ads,” to make things simple. However, when creating this goal, AdWords did not warn us that it would deactivate our current conversion tracking (email leads) at the account level. This was clear to us after noticing a decrease in email leads and investigating the issue. So when creating MCC level conversion tracking (cross-account conversion tracking), make sure that you create the same type of goal you previously had and don’t be afraid to track other actions. This will save you the hassle of figuring out where your leads are coming from and why they may have stopped generating.  

Some accounts may run for years without any conversion tracking set up at all and whether the person managing these accounts uses other metrics and Google Analytics to measure effectiveness, it is not the best way to monitor overall performance. Every marketer should know what happens after a user clicks on their ad and which keyword, ad or campaign triggered the conversion. It's important to know what’s worth bidding on and crucial to monitor conversions after making major changes.  If you need assistance implementing converstion tracking at the MCC or account level, please don't hesitate to reach out to our team.

Best Regards and Happy Holidays!

Sara Ayala

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