You have no idea what an important question this is!

I am amazed and annoyed when people bring to be their failing AdWords accounts to review and they haven’t even bothered to try and measure the simplest of performance statistics – the number of conversions each of their keywords is achieving.

It’s really simple to do and the information provided can actually save you tons of money and time in wasted effort. The absolute minimum that every AdWords account holder should do is set up conversion tracking for all their AdWords keywords.

This is how you do it:

1. Log in to your AdWords account.
2. Click on the “Reports” tab and select “conversions” from the drop menu.
3. Click the “new conversion” button.
4. Give your new conversion profile an “Action name“.
5. Select the most appropriate option from the “tracking purpose” drop list.
6. Provide AdWords with the “Page Security Level” of your website thank you page. The URL for the page will either start with HTTP or HTTPS. Select the correct one from the drop list.
7. If every purchase has a fixed value, then you can enter that into the “Revenue for conversion” field, otherwise, leave blank.
8. To protect your customer’s privacy, Google provides a small image for your website to indicate that information on that page is being tracked. You must show the image, but you can use the options provided to blend it to fit with your sites colour scheme.
9. Click on the “Save and get code” button.
10. Copy the code provided in the box below the button.
11. Paste the code into your website thank you page.

You probably know this, but your website thank you page is the last page in the sales process that a customer sees when they purchase from you. It’s usually used to confirm the order and tell your customer what will happen next.

If you don’t have a thank you page for your website, then place the code in a page as far down your sales funnel as you can.

When you install AdWords Conversion Tracking Software on your website, you’ll start to receive conversion statistics for all of your keywords and ads. You can now evaluate the performance of your keywords and ads based on how many sales they make rather than how much revenue they generate for Google.

But, if you’re like me, you’ll want to know exactly how people find your website regardless of where they come from. In fact, knowing what keywords people use to find your website in search engines etc. can be very useful insight into the keywords you should be targeting for your AdWords campaign.

Setting up Google Analytics for your website is a little more complex than installing the AdWords Conversion Tracking Code, but the extra information it gives you into the performance of your AdWords campaigns makes it well worth the effort.