This past week at SES San Francisco, I led a session on Advanced Channel Sequencing. This session dove into the consumer’s path to purchase and how each channel could help move a consumer along that path.
One of the major points of the presentation was to help advertisers understand how the channels work together and support each other.
Paid search is a great channel for getting in front of consumers who are actively looking for information on product and services. But to this date, many advertisers still manage their campaigns on a last click attribution model. This leaves top of the funnel keywords looking like they don’t perform well.
New Updates To AdWords Conversion Tracking
These days, businesses often own and operate multiple sites and multiple AdWords accounts. Google recently released two updates that will help advertisers better understand how the keywords and ads across all their accounts work together to lead to conversions.
Cross-Account Conversion Tracking
Now when you set up an account, you’ll be able to utilize one conversion pixel across multiple accounts.
This will make managing your tags significantly easier and you’ll be able to track users who interact with all of your efforts.
The biggest benefit of this is you will be able to see if keywords/ads within one account assist conversions within another account.
Cross-Account Search Funnels
Seeing search funnels across all of your accounts will also help you visualize the path to purchase better. You’ll have access to new reports as well:
- Overview Report: This report will show you the path consumers took to conversion across all accounts.
- Top Conversion Path Report: See which path to conversion occurs most frequently.
- Assisted Conversion Report: See which ads and keywords are working well at the top of the funnel.
How Can This Help You?
The most immediate help this new function will provide is in understanding where your conversions are coming from and where you should invest your money. Too often advertisers jack up their bids on the keywords that lead from a click to a conversion and they ignore the five other keywords that lead the consumer through the path to purchase.
If you happen to manage multiple brands or websites that operate in the same vertical, this new feature will be a great addition to your reporting efforts. As it will allow you to see how they interact together and ultimately how they lead a consumer to conversion.