The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

An online conversion, whether it’s a lead, a sale, or a newsletter signup, is a crucial performance metric that search engine marketers must be able to track and have access to. Fortunately, Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter provide advertisers with options to define and track online conversions by implementing a few lines of code.

Complexity occurs when advertisers want to track the three sets of code, because each network defines conversions differently. If you are managing accounts without a clear understanding of the definition of a conversion for each program, your ads may be performing better than you realize. In fact, you may be leaving money on the table with opportunities and sales going unrealized. To illustrate some of the differences, let’s take a closer look at the networks and their conversion-reporting capabilities.

Google AdWords: “1-Per-Click” vs. “Many-Per-Click” Conversions
In AdWords there are two kinds of conversions advertisers could report on: “1-per-click” and “many-per-click.” The “1-per-click” conversion metric reports on the number of unique users (within 30 days) who convert. Now, if that same user places repeat orders, even by skipping Google search ads in the future, and navigating directly to your site (within 30 days), additional conversions for that user will show up in your many-per-click conversion report.

Let’s look at 3 different scenarios of how this can work:

1.    A user clicks on your ad for the first time on Dec. 20 and makes a purchase. This conversion shows up as a “1-per-click” conversion on Dec. 20 and under “many-per-click” for Dec 20.

2.    A user clicks on your ad for the first time on Dec. 20, but decides not to make a purchase until Dec 24. This conversion shows up as a “1-per-click conversion” on Dec. 20 and under “many-per-click” on Dec. 24.

3.    A user clicks on your ad for the first time on Dec. 20, but doesn’t make a purchase until coming directly to your site on Jan. 10. The user also makes another purchase on Jan. 13. This conversion shows up under “1-per-click” and “many-per-click” for Dec. 20, plus you will see a conversion under “many-per-click for Jan 10 and Jan 13.

You will need to keep an eye on this as you may see the number of conversions changing (increasing) for past days. To view this data, click on the “Filters and Views” Tab in AdWords and select “Customize Columns.”

Next, select “Conv. (1-per-click),” “Conv. (many-per-click)” and any additional columns you want to view.

Microsoft adCenter Conversion Tracking
adCenter uses a 30-day cookie to track latent conversions and rolls everything into one metric simply called “conversions.” The initial latent sale is also associated with the original day of the click (within 30 days.)  When implementing the conversion tracking code, advertisers are required to display an external text link on their conversion pages. adCenter’s explanation for this requirement can be found here.

Yahoo Search Marketing Conversion Tracking: Understanding the Features and Limitations

Yahoo Conversion tracking reports on conversions in a different manner than AdWords or adCenter. While Yahoo uses a 45-day cookie to track latent conversions, it also attributes latent conversions to the keyword responsible for the conversion, but it will credit an “Assist” conversion to the keyword responsible for initially bringing the customer to your site. This number will show up in the “Assists” column.

This allows advertisers to more accurately attribute value to non-converting keywords. However, it becomes difficult to determine quantitative, actionable changes you need to make to your keyword sets. It is important to note that although this is an interesting feature, Yahoo conversion tracking will not track latent sales for customers who return to your site directly, or through organic search. It will only track latent conversions and “Assists” if they return to your site by clicking on another Yahoo ad and converting during that session.

Simplifying Decisions with Actionable Data

Only with a clear understanding of how to interpret conversion data across networks will you be able to maximize your optimization and budgeting efforts. What many marketers fail to consider are the latent conversions that their sites generate from paid search listings. Often, these conversions will not be counted towards paid search efforts - especially if advertisers don’t pay attention to the “many-per-click” metric in AdWords and “Assist” metric in Yahoo.

Clickable Pro overcomes this challenge with Clickable Conversion Tracking. With Clickable Conversion Tracking, advertisers can track latent paid conversions as well as the valuable direct latent conversions (within 30 days) across search engines without the need to install 3 sets of code. With this data, advertisers can justify bidding more aggressively on certain terms and make more educated decisions to drive more volume and increase overall efficiency.

If you'd like to try out our Conversion Tracking for free, contact us and we'll help you install it and provide you with a free trial of Clickable Pro, which provides daily recommendations to improve your account's performance.

Andrew Bernero, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.