Let’s face it, Google Adwords is probably 50% of your digital marketing budget. And its the 50% that’s actually working really well. So when you hear that Google is changing how it counts conversions, you naturally need to sit up and listen closely.
You can find the full blow by blow here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3438531
The main benefit of Google’s new “Flexible Conversion Counting” will be that advertisers can now decide for each conversion type, whether they allow duplicate counting of conversions per click/user. For some clients it won’t make a large difference, as their “one per click” vs “many per click” counting is always close.
This will have a very different impact on savvy Adwords Advertisers vs novice Adwords users.
Novice Advertisers:
Google makes most of its money from small business users of Adwords. They have found a really nice way to make you think your campaigns are improving in February, without you noticing! Most of you are looking at the “conversions one per click” column to count your conversions. All of a sudden, this column will be renamed to “converted clicks” which is a little ambiguous. You will now be naturally drawn to the column simply named “conversions”. This will be the old “many per click” column, you were probably ignoring. The problem is it will now be double counting events like signups or email address submissions, which you previously were rightfully ignoring.
Savvy Advertisers:
A savvy advertiser may take advantage of this new change. They may have ecommerce conversion events that they want to count several conversions per click, but also softer events like “newsletter signups” that they only want to count once per click. Now they have a way to toggle this at the conversion level, and simply only refer to the new column called “conversions” (the old “conversions many per click”) on the front end of the Adwords interface. This will speed up reporting and reduce the amount of columns needed to tell the true story of performance.
Adwords users are advised to configure the conversion settings properly so they have a proper “apples to apples” comparison between Jan and Feb, and continue to understand the true value of Adwords to their business.
