Whether you like it or not, you need pay per click tracking to help you assess the performance of your ad campaigns.  PPC tracking is essential for you to be assured that you will be getting optimum return on investment for your efforts on your pay per click campaigns.  You can generate traffic for your landing pages and websites through a wide assortment of pay per click tools that are available to you.

Your company will be ensured to get the rig ht traffic at the right cost per click, converting these to buying potentials.  What many startup pay per click marketers fail to recognize is that accurate PPC tracking is what helps boost the performance of pay per click ads on ad networks like Google AdWords, MSN AdCenter, or Yahoo Search.  

First of all, you might be wondering what is “third party tracking”, and allow me to have the liberty to shortly explain what this means to online marketers and how it affects pay per click advertising in a nutshell.  This is a type of tracking that is done by websites which a user never clearly navigates to.

Most internet users are not aware that a lot of their personal information can be collected online.  Currently, there is a huge debate over how the privacy of internet users are being protected with the presence of this type of tracking.  Those who oppose this type of tracking regard the importance of protecting the personal information of users from being accessed through cookies on browsers.

Call Tracking allows you to save your cash that could be spent on ads that do not really work.  You can identify which channels are really performing in bringing business in and which ones are just draining your advertising budget.  There are many tracking tools already available that can monitor the performance of your ads on computer users, but it can still be an existing challenge to track ad performance from calls.   

Performance of online advertising efforts can be easily measured but can give an incomplete data.  There is a need for advertisers to get an entire perspective of how online and offline efforts are performing.  Simply setting up your ads can be easy but it can be more challenging in determining how these perform which can be telling of how you need to improve your campaigns to help improve the performance of your business.  

Heat mapping in websites can be helpful in understanding usability and traffic of pages.  This kind of tracking determines which areas on a page people’s eyes usually look at when browsing.  You can make use of heat map data to design a page that will be performing well in terms of click through rates or high clicks on Google pay per click ads placements.

This kind of tracking makes a lot of sense.  It takes advantage of knowing where people’s eyes go when presented with a visual information on a web page.  Heat maps say so much about the effectiveness of web page designs and the usability of a page.  The maps serve as graphical representation of how the eyes view specific areas of a web page.  There are colored regions on these maps, representing a range of viewing activities.   

Google conversion code needs to be pasted on your pages which you would like to track.  This is a JavaScript snippet which builds a URL which passes some parameters back to any of Google’s servers.  The code will also allow you to have the text of the Google Site Stats on your page if you choose to show these on your conversions pages.  There are many ways by which the data from the code can be used.

A number of the usable codes or strings in conversion include:

    • google_conversion_language
        o This is the conversion tracking language which appears on the Google Site Stats text

    • google_conversion_id
        o This is a unique value, allowing Google to identify the unique advertiser that receives the conversion

    • google_conversion_label
        o This is a type of conversion which happens: a sign-up, a page view, a purchase, or a lead.  Google will not yet support conversion types which are customized by an advertiser.  That makes this string not customizable.

    • google_conversion_value
        o This is the numeric value which is defined by and advertiser that would be equivalent to the conversion’s value.

Google AdWords pay per click management includes conversion tracking.  This is crucial for the success in the pay per click advertising model.  Since advertisers pay the ad hosting company for every single click on an ad campaign, it is essential to get returns for the money spent on cost per click.  The merchant will not incur any cost if there are no click throughs.  Without knowing these numbers, it would be difficult to gauge how effective one’s online campaigns are.

All pay per click ad hosting networks will display ads which should be relevant to the content of the website or queries that match those keywords in ad advertiser’s list.  In Google AdWords, you may be able to get insights from its guide that you may also print out for reference.  You may uses this guide to gradually learn how to effectively run and manage for AdWords conversions in pay per click.