Google have unleashed a nifty feature for content network campaigns today and I’m pretty excited. You can now track conversions, without anyone actually clicking on your adverts.
What?
It’s called ‘View-Through Conversions’. Basically, Google will track not only when someone clicks your advert, but also when someone sees your advert. If that person visits your website in the next 30 days and performs an action you’re tracking, it counts as a view-through conversion. As far as I can tell, they don’t actually have to click on your ad at all.
Is this good?
Well, it’s good if you’re using the content network as a branding exercise and want to find out how effective it is. Text ads, being so easily overlooked, aren’t exactly good for branding so if you’re just using those you might not get a lot of useful info out of this new feature. Anyone using banner ads on the other hand – where the whole idea is to push your brand across – will be very interested to see how memorable those ads are.
It’s definitely a positive development by the Adwords folk. After all, people don’t always click the adverts on websites but they might remember them for later. Even if there’s no direct link between someone seeing your ad and a sale, you can still prove your ad was seen before that sale which is a great argument for pushing your brand.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the new report info, especially if it’s integrated with all the other reporting features like networks, demographics etc. Good work Adwords!
Zoe Piper works for Branded3 as an SEO & PPC guru. Zoe's PPC column appears every week on Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Would be awesome if they integrated it with DoubleClick etc…
More comments from Robert NicholsonMay work well for branding. I’ll test it out. Problem is most of my content network promotions are heavily weighted towards benefit statements in the headline.
It doesn’t work with text ads!
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160784
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@Gal ooh thanks for pointing that out – Google didn’t say it in the original post. Well, I figured the new tracking wouldn’t be that useful for text ads anyway so nothing lost really
Maybe they could remove the tracking column from text ad-only accounts though to make it a bit clearer.
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Thanks for the information about Google new feature on Adwords, let me check this Google new service and the outcomes of it.
More comments from tag44Interesting development. As you say, it’s much more relevant to visual banner ads. However, I think we might have to take these kind of stats with a pinch of salt – 30 days is a long time in which to have ‘remembered’ the ad and then visited the site in question (I would imagine the viewer would have also received another trigger [perhaps not even having noticed the first] which makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of the original ad). It’s always good though to have extra information to consider when building an overall marketing strategy. Sadly though, I imagine Google’s reason for adding this feature is not primarily to provide us with richer statistical information, but instead to convince pay per click customers that their ads are worth the money they are paying.
Would be awesome if they integrated it with DoubleClick etc…
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