New Adwords Feature Doubles Conversions overnight!

Have you noticed that your conversions in Adwords appear to have doubled recently.

They have at least doubled and in many cases they appear to have done even better than that!

So, what’s going on?

Take a look at the screenshot below taken from one of my Google Adwords accounts.

Now at first glance you might assume that this is telling me that I have had 49 conversions but in actual fact I haven’t.

What’s causing all the confusion for people is the new statistic that Google have added called Many Per Click Conversions.

This new number is really useful but before I explain it, let me make sure we all understand the 1 Per Click Converions number.

You see, 1 Per Click Conversion is telling you how many people have been converted. So if you are measuring sales using conversion tracking then 1 Per Click is telling you how many people bought something from you.

If, for example, someone comes to your site through an Ad and buys from you the  1 Per Click conversion number will be one. If that same person comes back to your site the following day and buys from you again the 1 Per Click Conversion number will still be 1. So this statistic is really telling you how many people have been converted and NOT how many conversions you’ve had in total.

For ages, this has been the only conversion count you could get from Adwords.

However now they have introduced the Many Per Click statistic and this tells you how many conversions you’ve had (eg: how many sales not just how many people you’ve sold to).

In the example of the returniong buyer the Many Per Click number would be 2.

The screenshot above tells us that 22 people had made a purchase and that there had been 27 individual sales in total. Clearly some of the 22 buyers had come back and bought again.

Personally if I’m tracking sales from Adwords then the Many Per Click number is far more interesting to me as it tells me how successful a keyword or Ad is at making sales.

Of course, what I really want to know is not just how many sales but how much sales but you can’t really get that from Adwords as it stands at the moment.