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Google AdWords Adds Cross-Account Conversion Tracking & MCC Search Funnels

Ginny Marvin on August 27, 2013 at 1:05 pm

To help advertisers track performance across multiple AdWords accounts, Google announced cross-account conversion tracking and search funnel reporting. This is the first of several announcements about new cross-channel conversion tracking and attribution capabilities Google has planned for the next few months.

With cross-account conversion tracking, you can create one snippet of code to use across all of your accounts and ensure a conversion is counted just once across accounts. The idea is to help eliminate duplicate conversion counts and allow for cross-account attribution so, for example, you can see assist conversions for all AdWords clicks leading up to a conversion.

As shown in the screenshot below, the cross-account conversion tracking set-up process is the same as the standard set up. Choose from the three conversion options of webpage, call on-site and app download. (You can also use Google Tag Manager.)

After you’ve tagged the conversion pages, select the accounts you want to track within your MCC. For cross-account tracking to work, all accounts have to be housed under the same MCC — in other words, there is no cross-MCC tracking. So, if multiple agencies are managing different aspects of an account — say display, search and PLAs — you’ll want to house those accounts under the same MCC.

Going forward, when you add a new AdWords account to your My Client Center account (MCC), you can enable Conversion Tracking with the check of a box. In addition, you no longer have to re-define all of your conversions when you create a new account.

Google cautions to leave your old conversion tracking snippets on your pages for 30 days to ensure any conversions aren’t lost. Strip out the old code snippets after 30 days. You can also revert back to single-account tracking if you decide to do so.

Once cross-account conversion tracking is enabled, you can access cross-account search funnels reports in the MCC. Reports include the Overview report, Top Conversion Paths report and Assisted Conversions report.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.