Knowledge is the Foundation To Success  

My last blog was about the different ways Google AdWords tracks pay-per-click (PPC) advertising conversions and Google Analytics tracks PPC transactions. If you have a large number of site visitors who don’t purchase on the first visit, but do on subsequent visits, Google Analytics doesn’t attribute the transaction to how they found you in the first place. A way to get around that is to track revenue in Google AdWords.

I’ll have to admit that this is something relatively new to me (and a thank you to Michael Whitaker at Monitus for telling me it was possible). A search through Google AdWords help files comes up with nothing, nor did my Google reps ever explain that it could be done – they always pointed to Analytics as the tool to track revenue. And the answer is really simple – when you add conversion tracking to your thank you page, you can alter the code slightly to capture the revenue generated by an order.

You’ll need to change the YOUR-ORDER$ to be the field name of your order subtotal which can differ by shopping cart.

One note on this: I attempted to do it for a client that uses a Volusion cart and processes credit cards offline (meaning they don’t actually process the credit card at the time of order, but do it manually at a later time), but this won’t work for them. I’m guessing that this will hold true for any shopping cart; if you don’t process credit cards in real-time, it won’t work. In fact, for my client above, it also prevented conversions from tracking.

One more thing to know about tracking Google AdWords revenue: you can’t see results within the Google AdWords interface, you have to run a report to actually get the data. You’ll need to select the field “Sales Conv. Value (many-per-click)” in order to add that data to a report, and then you’ll be able to see revenue by Account, Campaign, AdGroup and even keyword by keyword, and learn how profitable your PPC campaigns really are. If you need help getting Google AdWords Revenue Tracking implemented and/ or analyzed, contact a reputable PPC management company for assistance.

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Lately I’ve been getting asked by Google AdWords clients for help with Google Analytics and the need seems to be increasing rapidly. More and more of my ppc advertising clients are wanting information about their site, bounce rate, exit pages, revenue and more (Google Analytics is a free tracking program offered by Google). I’m not a Google Analytics expert by any means, but I do know the basics of how to create an account, how to implement the code, how to setup goals (which is critical for tracking conversions) and how to analyze results.

Google Analytics provides great information, but one issue that can arise is when Google Analytics transaction numbers and the Google AdWords conversion tracking numbers don’t jive. I know that different packages are not going to track exactly the same, but most of the time, they are close enough that it’s not a big deal. However, a big issue arises when you have an e-commerce site and a decent percentage of people don’t order on their first visit, but come back and order at a later date.

Here’s the problem: Google AdWords tracks “first touch” – if someone searches on a term, clicks on your ad and comes to your site, does not order at that moment, but comes back a week later, AdWords will log the conversion back that first date and attribute the sale to AdWords. Analytics on the other hand tracks “last touch.” In our same scenario, if someone were to search, click an ad, visit the site and leave, then come back a week later, Analytics would attribute that search to organic or other, unless they did a search and clicked on an ad again. Not a big deal if a majority of visitors order on the first visit, but if you have a large amount of people who order at a later date, this can be present a huge problem.

I have two clients who have this issue. For one of them, 40% of visitors don’t order on their first visit, and the other is 50%. And you guessed it, there’s a 40% and 50% difference in AdWords conversions and Analytics transactions. They can’t get a true picture of their PPC ROI with Google Analytics because they only see the revenue for anyone who ordered the first time they visited the site.

The big question is why is that? You would think that, both being Google products, they would track the same way, or at least have an option to track that way, but they don’t. Frustrating for both me and my clients!

But, I’ll explain how to get around this dilemma in my next Blog.

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Google Analytics is a great tool to use for website owners – it gives you lots of interesting information to help you improve your site, can track revenue and a whole slew of other things, all for free. But sometimes it can be a little difficult to figure out why it’s not working properly, even for the Google Analytics team.

Case in point: I have a client who I’ve been working with for about three weeks, trying to get Analytics to properly track their site. They use NetSolutions storefront, so it’s easy to add the Analytics code to the site, as they have it built in to their store. We just added the client’s UA number to a field and the code is automatically added in the footer.

Of course, one of the first couple of things I did to try figure out why it wasn’t working was to verify the UA number (it was correct) and that it was populating the code on every page (it was). I called in JumpFly’s dedicated Google Account rep for help, since that about exhausted my troubleshooting options.

After some back and forth with Google and the Analytics team, they finally asked if there was a potential redirect on the site, since the “gclid=” portion of the URL was being stripped off of the destination URL from Google Search, and they couldn’t think of anything else that was wrong. (Basically the “=GCLID” holds all the visitor information for analytics to track; if it gets removed, Google Analytics attributes the visitor to no source or Google organics.) Sure enough, if I seached for the client’s ad, clicked on it, and checked the destination URL, there was no “=GLID”, therefore Analytics couldn’t attribute the source properly.

And that’s when I figured out that the client’s webmaster, in order to improve natural rankings, had changed the client’s site to use more search-engine friendly URLs – instead of a “category=##” URL, it was now using actual names, like military.asp or movie.asp. He had done the right thing in creating automatic redirects so old links didn’t go to dead pages, but it’s not something we were notified of, so we had no idea it was happening.

Now that we know, we can fix the URLs to the correct pages so the redirect stops happening, and Google Analytics can properly attribute traffic to the correct source. At least, that’s the hope.

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