“Conversion” is an ambiguous marketing term. Every marketing team defines their conversions slightly differently, which can create a lot of confusion and vaguety, especially when it comes to PPC marketing and Google Ads.
How you define conversions within your own organization will affect your conversion value. This is a crucial metric in tracking the return-on-investment (ROI) from your PPC campaigns. It can also be used to optimize your efforts to unlock stronger returns and find higher value customers.
This discussion will explore the basics to conversion value and how you can begin tracking it within your own PPC campaigns. Here you actually need to know what is ppc.
What Is Conversion Value?
Essentially, a conversion value is how much a conversion activity is worth to your business. This value is typically represented in dollars and cents. Conversion values are created to help businesses better understand their returns, particularly across many different conversion activities because each type of action creates a different level of return.
For example, an email sign up may create more value for your business than if someone downloads an eBook or calls. Distinguishing this difference will allow you to more accurately measure the total value being driven to your company through your PPC marketing, instead of just the total number of conversions that occured.
The Benefits Of Conversion Value
Aside from having a more accurate view of where and how you are generating your returns from marketing, understanding your conversion values carries a number of other benefits.
In Google Ads, inputting conversion values is necessary to use certain Smart Bidding options, such as Target ROAS and Maximize conversion value.
Target ROAS uses your conversion values to ensure that you achieve a targeted return on your ad spend. Maximize conversion value, on the other hand, will aim to increase the total conversion value of your campaign within your set budget.
With these automated bid strategies, you can better optimize performance for the given goal. And, you’ll spend less time than if you manually performed these activities.
Inputting your conversion values will also provide better insights that lead to stronger returns. You can track keyword and campaign performance by conversion value/cost and better optimize campaigns to support the high-value activities.
You can also use this report to see the total conversion value earned by your PPC conversions in a given timeframe. This is a fast and effective way to look at your total profits gained versus what you’ve spent. Remember, tracking ROI is crucial for marketing success!
Transaction-Specific Conversions Vs Same Value Conversions
There are two types of conversion values: static and dynamic. A static conversion carries the same value every time, while a dynamic one changes each time a conversion is made. This distinction is also looked at as transaction-specific conversions versus same value conversions.
Transaction-Specific Conversions: The value is different each time the same conversion activity takes place. This is common with online stores where every transaction holds a different value. Sometimes, these values can be wildly different.
For example, an electronics store could handle one transaction for a new phone case that has a value of $10. The next customer could purchase an entire entertainment system for $4,000. Each are technically conversions, but the latter is much more valuable.
Creating transaction-specific conversion values is a more involved process than same value conversions. You may need to enlist the help of your website developer to input the right codes that allow for dynamic conversion tracking. That said, this is well worth the effort.
Same Value Conversions: If your conversion activity creates the same value every time, then you just need to enter one number. For instance, you may generate roughly $50 every time someone downloads your eBook, or $10 for every newsletter signup.
It’s useful to separate these values because then you can measure that an eBook download is 5X more valuable than a newsletter signup. Again, this gives you deeper insight into what activities are most valuable for your organization.
If you don’t have the time or ability to set up dynamic conversion values for your transactions, you can take an average of all of your transaction data and use this as a static value. It won’t be as accurate as dynamic transaction values, but it will offer you some insight into your conversion amounts.
Tracking Conversions Without A Monetary Value
While it is easy to identify the conversion value of transactions and other activities, there are some conversions that are harder to connect to dollars and cents. Yet, they may be important activities for your business to track and evaluate.
You can measure the relative value of these activities by inputting a value, but not selecting a currency to add. These values can act as your key performance indicators. You won’t be able to track your return on ad spend, but you will be able to optimize your campaigns for the activities you find most important.
How To Set Conversion Values
When you create a new conversion action, Google will ask if you want to set a conversion value for the activity. Otherwise, you can edit your conversion values in your Google Ads account. Here are step-by-step instructions to add or edit your conversion values:
- Once signed into your Google Ads account, click the wrench icon in the upper right-hand corner.
- From this menu, look for “Measurement;” this is where you’ll find the “Conversions” option.
- After clicking “Conversions,” you’ll see a list of all of your conversion activities. You can select the name of the conversion that you wish to edit.
- Click “Edit Settings” and then “Value.”
- Google provides a number of different ways to track and enter your values. Choose the options that best suit your business and its goals.
- Save and press Done.
Conclusions
Setting and optimizing your conversion values can be the difference between producing a strong, profitable return and barely making any returns at all. Worse yet, without conversion tracking, you may even be taking a loss from your online advertising efforts!
By optimizing for your strongest conversion values, you can focus on the activities that are most important to your business. In other words, the activities that earn you the most money!