Introduction to Conversion Tracking - Google AdWords Learning Center

An AdWords conversion occurs when someone clicks on your AdWords ad and performs a behavior on your website that you recognize as a completed sale or collected lead. Conversions can include the purchase of a digital camera, a visitor submitting their contact information for an insurance quote, or a prospective buyer downloading a white paper about your company's software capabilities.

The conversion rate listed in your account is the number of conversions divided by the number of ad clicks. Conversions are only counted on Google and some of our Google Network partners. The conversion rate is adjusted to reflect only the ad clicks on which we can track conversions.

Another important term to understand when tracking conversions is 'transaction.' While a conversion represents somebody coming to your site through AdWords and making a purchase, the transaction represents the purchase or desired visitor action itself.

Conversion tracking is free - all you need is an AdWords account and access to your website's HTML. Setting up conversion tracking is a straightforward process that gets you started tracking overall conversions with minimal steps. You can also select advanced conversion tracking options with more customized preferences such as assigning unique conversion values. With conversion tracking in general, you can specify conversion types such as purchases or sales, leads, signups, and page views. You can also create your own conversion type from the Other option. The advanced settings options will be covered in detail in later topics.

To set up conversion tracking for your active ads, log in to your account and click the Conversion Tracking link on the Campaign Management tab at the top of your account.

You can stop or re-start conversion tracking at any time. To do so, log into your account and click the Conversion Tracking link on the Campaign Management tab, then click Stop conversion tracking. To stop sending tracking data to Google or remove the Google Site Stats text, remove the conversion tracking code from your website. Stopping conversion tracking in your AdWords account will remove the statistics and tracking information from your AdWords account pages. However, your reporting data will still be available via the Report Center.