Google AdWords To Roll Out Flexible Conversion Counting, Says Goodbye To 1 Per-Click, Many-Per-Click

This morning, Google announced in an email to a number of advertisers that upcoming changes will give advertisers more flexibility in how they track conversions in AdWords. With the update comes a semantic change that ushers in new names for the Conversions one per-click and Conversions many-per-click columns.

With the change, advertisers will be able to choose one of the following conversion settings for each conversion action being tracked (including goals imported from Google Analytics):

All conversions setting: With the All conversions setting each sale or conversion action that occurs after an ad click will be tallied. The example Google gives here is of a travel booking site that wants to capture sales for both hotel room and rental car bookings. If a customer that books a hotel and rental car, the all conversions setting will count two conversions.

Unique conversions setting: This setting is primarily devised for lead generation tracking. The example here is of an insurance agency that offers home and auto insurance. If a customer fills out two home insurance leads and three car insurance leads (perhaps with different criteria), AdWords will only count two conversions — one for each of the unique lead types. Note that App downloads can only be tracked as unique conversions.

The flexibility comes in to play particularly when advertisers are running both sales and lead generation campaigns. They can designate different conversion settings for each. For example using the all conversions setting for e-commerce sales and the unique conversions setting for consulting or service contract leads.

To change the conversion settings, a new “Count” drop down will be available in the conversion settings window. “All conversions” is the default setting.

New Column Names

The reporting will show “Converted clicks” and “Conversions”. This is meant to be clearer, but may take some getting used to. They definitely will make these columns in Excel exports easier to manage. Here’s how to remember it:

• Converted clicks = Conversions (1 per-click). This is still a reflection of the number of clicks that led to one or more conversions.
• Conversions = Conversions (many-per-click). This column will now count the number of conversions based on your settings of All conversions or Unique conversions.

For more details and how the changes will affect estimated total and cross-device conversions as well as bidding strategies, scroll to the end of Google’s documentation here. The changes are due to roll out this month.

Hat tip to Michelle Morehouse and Clix Marketing. See the Clix Marketing blog for the full email Google sent to advertisers about the changes.