In determining the effectiveness of a particular AdWords campaign for an eCommerce store we often turn to the all important cost per conversion metric. At the highest level, you can compare the amount spent per sale in a given time period to your costs and/or profit margins, and determine a return on your ad spend. However, without some tinkering, most of the reports generated from AdWords will only count one conversion per click by default. But what if one of those clicks leads to multiple sales? I’ll show you how to have AdWords give you credit for multiple conversions, and determine a truer cost per conversion.
Consider the following scenario. A customer finds your website through a pay per click ad and purchases a smaller ticket item from your site. When the customer receives the item when they expected, and in good condition, they develop a trust with your site. A week later, they head back to the site directly and make a larger purchase. A pretty likely scenario, in my opinion.
With AdWords standard reporting this registers as just one conversion. However, by doing the following, you will be able to rightfully get credit for the sale as a conversion, which will help considerably in determining effectiveness.
Head over to the reports tab within AdWords and create a new report. All of the reports are capable of showing multiple conversions per click, except for the Search Query Performance report.
Open up the “Add or Remove Columns” option and select the 1-per-click and many-per click options for conversions and cost/conv check boxes (as seen above).
Once the report is all set, take a look at the results, and you’ll see two different cost/conversions and total conversion counts. In my opinion, this many-per-click conversion metric is more useful in determining your return on ad spend because it accounts for the likely occurrence of a repeat buyer coming from pay per click advertising. And since you paid for that first click, why shouldn’t you assign the credit of the conversion to its original campaign?
So why isn’t this the default? Consider non-eCommerce conversions like newsletter sign ups or capturing contact information. With these goals, getting unique information from each conversion is the only valuable result, and thus we have no need to track many-per-click.
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