Conversion tracking refers to an optional reporting metric that helps you measure the success of your PPC campaigns—and more accurately evaluate your return on investment—through the use of a tracking script embedded on your website.  Once implemented, this script reports back to adCenter when a user (who arrived at your site through your adCenter ad) performs some sort of desirable action while there.

Enabling Conversion Tracking for adCenter

When a user clicks on your adCenter ad, what is it you’re hoping they do after arriving at your website?  You’ll need to have a clear idea what you consider a conversion to be before enabling this feature in your search and/or content campaigns because adCenter offers three different options for tracking conversions (clicking on the links below will bring you to the Learning Center for instructions on implementing each method):

Count One Conversion Per Click - Use this method if you want the first conversion to occur when a user makes the first click. Any subsequent conversions from the same click will not be counted. You may wish to use this  to improve conversion counts or when you have smaller, less complex web sites. This is the most commonly used option by advertisers.

Count One Conversion Per Unique URL - Use this method if you are able to embed a unique code into your URLs and want to count based on unique values. Traditionally these values have been session IDs, receipt numbers or any combination of values that you can use to singularly identify a visitor.

Count All Conversions - Use this method if you want to count all conversion events, and if you have your own way of handling refreshes or wish to track a raw number of conversions associated to a single click. These values are traditionally session IDs, receipt numbers and any combination of values that you can use to singularly identify a visitor.

Disabling Conversion Tracking for adCenter

Should you decide for whatever reason that you’d like to turn off conversion tracking in your adCenter campaigns, it’s a fairly simple process to do so (the below content is taken directly from adCenter Help):

1. Click the Campaigns tab.
2. In the Campaign column, click the name of the campaign for which you want to stop conversion tracking.
3. On the Campaign selected page, click Change settings.
4. Under Campaign settings, clear the Track conversions check box.
5. Remove the code snippet that you placed within the HTML body tags of your conversion webpages.

Note: When you stop conversion tracking, your reports still contain the conversion data that was collected while conversion tracking was on. However, conversion data is not collected after you stop conversion tracking.

If after reading through this post you feel as though you need more detail on this topic, I’d recommend checking out both the Conversion Tracking How-To Guide that’s linked to at the bottom of each of the instruction pages above, as well as Mary Berk's post, adCenter Conversion Tracking: Helping Advertisers Improve Their Campaigns.

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