Direct-response marketing has been around for over 100 years. Since the early days of catalog sales. Pre-internet direct-response marketers were at the mercy of the postal system and the placement of “inquiry numbers” appearing in catalog or magazine ads. The cycle time for feedback on things such as ad copy, graphics or item popularity was measured in months.

Conversion tracking is arguably the single most important aspect of search engine marketing, simply because of how much it reduces the time it takes to receive feedback on many important aspects of the selling process; keywords, search terms, ad copy, website features and functions, etc.

But what if the nature of your business and the way you engage with prospects doesn’t lend itself to AdWords conversion tracking? Or if designing, developing, implementing and managing website functionality that uses conversion tracking is not worth the investment required. In these cases you will be at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to creating and managing a successful AdWords campaign.

How I create and manage your account is highly dependent on whether conversion tracking is in place, working properly and tracks actions which are a meaningful part of the engagement process. Without reliable conversion tracking data, it’s like throwing something “over the fence” and hoping it hits the target.

AdWords conversion tracking is free and relatively easy to set up, assuming you have an appropriate action that is a meaningful part of the selling process that a first-time visitor will take. Here is a short YouTube video on how to set up conversion tracking in your AdWords account.

In many cases, I find that either advertisers do not implement conversion tracking when they should or they have it set up incorrectly or they don’t know how to use the data to manage their account. If an advertiser has implemented conversion tracking correctly and the data is accurate and reliable, it makes a significant difference in the account manager's ability to successfully manage their account.

I often find that an advertiser has all the right conditions for implementing conversion tracking, but simply hasn’t done it, for one reason or another. If they would allow me to take the time to help them implement conversion tracking before working on their campaigns, I would. The sooner you begin collecting conversion tracking data, the better.

Even with all its advantages, conversion tracking is not perfect and should be used to analyze trends and not an exact representation of every action taken on your site. More specifically, it will not work correctly if:

• The visitor does not accept cookies
• The visitor deletes their cookies
• The visitor does not have Java enabled in their browser
• The visitor takes the action more than 30 days after clicking on the ad
• The Java script tracking code is not placed on the page properly

With that caveat, it is still well worth the time, effort and expense.

Now that you have a better appreciation for the value of and limitations of conversion tracking, let's peel the onion back a bit further.

Because conversion tracking uses a 30-day cookie, cost/conv data for any given keyword on any given day will change based on newly registered conversions. Here is something for you to think about. If you want to know the effect a change you make today has on cost/conv, you need to wait at least sixty days and then look back thirty days. Otherwise you will be dealing with incomplete and misleading data.

You need to resist evaluating a new keyword based on short-term data. Also keep in mind that the number of impressions and clicks can vary considerably from day-to-day. You must be willing to have the necessary confidence, commitment and patience or you should not be doing this.

Depending on your market, conversion tracking data can increase many fold over the life of the cookie, as visitors return to your site (from non-AdWords links) and convert. I make the distinction, “from non-AdWords links”, such as a bookmark, organic listing or website referrals, because AdWords attributes the conversion to the last-clicked ad, keyword and search term, even if the keyword or ad is paused.

I make the point about paused keywords because you will continue to register conversions in your account from keywords in your old campaigns which may be paused, and you probably won’t be looking at those keywords when we launch a new ad group or campaign(s).