As a consultant, running 4-6 audits a day with business owners just like you, I find an overwhelming number of people lack the ability to understand the concept of tracking the efforts of their marketing budget. Any good market professional understands the difficulty of advertising in the dark. Not knowing where your leads are coming from makes it difficult to focus your attention on those “Pure Gold” marketing channels. You can stop dropping cash on money pits yielding very little in return.

AdWords is no different than any other marketing channel and Google makes it very simple for you to understand how much revenue your account is generating for your business. Couple that tracking with a regular CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition) goal optimization and it will be nearly IMPOSSIBLE for you to lose money in AdWords. Yes, you read that right. However, we won't talk about how to optimize for CPA goals today. We will take this one step at a time. Let’s focus on how to get conversion tracking set up first.

How Conversions Work

The first thing you are going to want to do is to take a look at your site. What is the purpose of your site? Do you want people to call you? Do you want to get people to fill out a form? Or are you e-commerce and you want a ton of sales directly on your website?

If your main goal is to get people to fill out a form, but your form is hiding on page 3, and you have your phone number in huge bold numbers on the first page, you may want to consider a redecoration of your site to funnel people properly.

After getting your “call to action” clearly defined, now you just need to get the conversion code that Adwords allows you to, so conveniently, create in the Conversion Tools page within Adwords.

Log into your AdWords account and click on the (Tools) > (Conversions) > (+Conversion)

AdWords will walk you through the steps and this is very simple. Make sure you read and do each step! However, there is one important piece a lot of people miss. That is, getting the right value set to each conversion.

Now you need to figure out your CPA goal. A simple way to do this is to figure out what you are willing to pay for a lead or a sale of your product.

• E-Commerce: What is your average order size? (Average order size x Margins) = CPA Goal
• Lead Gen: What is a new customer/client worth to you in profit? What is your close rate when you get a new lead? (Customer worth x close rate) = CPA Goal

Pretty simple right? Yet thousands of AdWords users fail to get these numbers right. Make sure you understand how much you are willing to pay for a new customer or lead before you go advertising for them.

AdWords is a complicated beast to tame, but when you get it down and optimize it regularly it can be a very profitable channel of marketing for your business.

If all of this seems overwhelming to you, you are not alone. The reality is, our Certified AdWords and Markering Professionals live and breath this stuff as a living and aren’t as expensive as you!

Let us manage your account for you. Right now you can try our service for 30 days for only $7 (regularly $299/month). Click the button below to get started.