Setting Up Conversion Types

Setting Up Conversion Types

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. How to create conversion types
3. Add to Total Revenue/Conversions
4. Track conversions on Date of Click/Date of Conversion
5. Conversions per click
6. Important notes

Introduction

For many search marketers, there are often several different ways in which a site visitor can convert.

For example, a visitor to an e-commerce site might make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or look up the location of a store. Each of type of conversion is valuable to the retailer, and for optimal search management, each should be considered when determining the success of a creative or keyword. The application also gives you the visibility to understand which keywords are driving which types of conversions, and lets you adjust your bidding strategy to reflect differences in bids.

How to create conversion types

Multiple Conversion Types must be set up by clicking into the Admin section, the Revenue sub-tab and then on the Conversion Types link. By default, only a Total conversion type is defined. Click the Create button to add a new conversion type.

Enter the name of the conversion type name, a unique ID and the column header to be used for display. While all fields are editable, do not edit your conversion ID, as changing this will break your revenue integration and you will have incomplete revenue and conversion data.

We recommend that no more than 50 conversion types be created in a single client account. If more than 50 conversion types are created, this may slow down the performance of your account, and may also cause the History tab to not pull in data.

Add to Total Revenue/Conversions

You have the choice of whether conversions and revenue should be automatically aggregated into Total Revenue and Total Conversions. In general, if you want the conversion type to factor in your bidding optimization, it should be included in totals. Biddable conversion types are generally sales, purchases, or other revenue-based events. Non-biddable conversion types may be pageviews, coupon prints or other non-revenue based actions you are tracking, but that do not affect your bidding strategy.

Track conversions on Date of Click/Date of Conversion

You have the choice of tracking conversions based on the date the click took place, the date the conversion took place or both. For example, a visitor may click on the paid search ad on 7/10/2010. The visitor may then make a purchase on 7/15/2010. If you choose to track conversions based on date of click, the conversion would be attributed to 7/10/2010. If you choose to track conversions based on date of conversion, the conversion would be attributed to 7/15/2010.

Note:

• You have a choice to track both Date of Click and Date of Conversion for the Total conversion type. However, because Date of Click tracking is required for bidding, you cannot select only Date of Conversion tracking for the Total conversion type.
• If you use the Publisher Tracking, you cannot track conversions on Date of Conversion.

Conversions per click

You have the choice of tracking ‘one-per-click’ or ‘many-per-click’ conversions for each conversion type. If ‘one-per-click’ is selected, the application will only ever attribute 1 conversion per search click. If ‘many-per-click’ is selected, the application will attribute all conversions that occur after a paid search click back to that paid search click. For example, if a visitor clicks on a paid search add and proceeds to make 3 hotel reservations, The application will attribute 1 conversion to the paid search click if ‘one-per-click’ is selected. If ‘many-per-click’ is selected, the application will attribute 3 conversions to the paid search click.

Note: If you have individual conversion types set up for many-per-click and one-per-click, then the total displayed in the Total column won’t always match the sum of the 2 individual conversion types. This is due to the data being displayed in the Total column as one-per-click.

Important notes

• Note that if you are using Cross Client Attribution (CCA), all conversions types must be exactly the same across all the accounts (parent and children).
• If you update your conversion type settings, this change will be reflected moving forward but will not be reflected retroactively.

For example, if you have updated the settings so that all of your conversion types are now included in totals, a workaround to see this retroactively is to create a custom column that would sum all of these metrics. Custom columns will recalculate for past data as well as future data. For more information, please read our Help article on Custom Columns.

• If a conversion type is changed from Date of Click and Date of Conversion to just Date of Click, and then switched back, the previous Date of Conversion data will show all zeros. In the event that this does happen, please contact Support Services or your platform representative for assistance.
• It’s possible that some conversion types may seem to generate revenue but have zero conversions shown within the Total. This is most commonly caused by an incorrectly configured Google Analytics mapping.

The solution is to edit your GA settings so that the relevant conversions in GA correspond to the relevant conversion type in our platform (that is not showing within totals).

• There is no restriction on how many conversion types a platform account can have. However, having too many conversion types may affect application performance. Please speak with your platform representative if you need to have a large amount of conversion types created.