AdWords Flexible Conversion Counting Officially Launched, Welcome “Converted Clicks” and “Conversions”

Earlier this month, we covered Google’s news to select advertisers that it would be rolling out new options for tracking conversions in AdWords. The company officially announced the launch of Flexible Conversion Counting, and advertisers will see new columns in AdWords.

In reporting terms, the change means the Conversions (One-Per-Click) will be replaced with “Converted Clicks,” and Conversions (Many-Per-Click) will be replaced by “Conversions.”

Advertisers can think of the newly named columns this way:

Converted Clicks = Unique Customers. This is “the number of clicks that convert within your chosen conversion window (typically 30 days)”.  So, if a customer makes two separate purchases after clicking on an ad, they will register as one Converted Click.

Conversions: Total Conversion Actions or Total Sales + Unique Leads. The new settings here give advertisers the flexibility to set the way conversion actions are counted by All or Unique.

The change will be particularly helpful for advertisers that are driving both online sales and online leads through AdWords. In the example shown below, the advertiser wants to count every sale and each unique lead as a conversion. If the same person clicks on an ad and comes to the site twice, making two separate purchases, that will count that as one Converted Click (i.e. Unique Customer) and two Conversions (i.e. Sales). However, if a customer clicks an ad and downloads a total of four product catalogs in multiple visits, the advertiser can change the Conversions settings for the downloads count them as one unique lead. So, these actions will register as one Converted Click (i.e. Unique Customer) and just one Conversion (i.e. Unique Lead).

New Flexible Conversion Counting in AdWords

To set up flexible conversion tracking, go to the  conversions Settings page. A new drop down lets you choose how you’d like to count each of your conversions. The choices are “All conversions” or “Unique conversions”. As in the example above, selecting Unique Conversions allows you to count multiple PDF downloads, for example, as one Unique Lead. The “All conversions” setting is what the advertiser above has chosen for sales.

If you’re using Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC, you can choose whether to have the bid management tools focus on Converted Clicks or Conversions.

By clicking on each individual conversion type, you can then select the setting of “All conversions” or “Unique conversions”. Google says this is possible as well for goals imported from Google Analytics into AdWords, but I’m not seeing this availability yet. I’ve inquired with Google and will update here when I hear back.  Additionally, if you import the same goals into different AdWords accounts, you are supposed to be able to choose a different counting setting for each account.

Some other items to note:

• Estimated total conversions will reflect your chose counting method. If you’re counting unique conversions, the estimated cross-device conversions will be based on unique conversions instead of all conversions.
• App downloads can only be counted as “Unique conversions.”
• The “Converted clicks” column can’t be segmented by conversion action, since an ad click can lead to multiple conversion actions.
• Cross-device estimates of converted clicks are not available.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.