So what does the Google Grant bring to your business? Are you using the “free money” Google affords you to generate real revenue for your organisation? There are numerous ways to track this, but also numerous obstacles to getting this tracking in place as well.

The ideal situation
You tag all of your inbound traffic, and you can see at a glance which website, channel, campaign or keyword was the last referral point before a user came to your site and completed a key goal (download, sale, donation etc). You can talk in terms of marketing spend per completed goal for any channel, including AdWords.

AdWords Conversion Tracking
By implementing AdWords specific code on your goal completion pages, you will be able to see in your AdWords dashboard the cost / conversion for any keyword, ad text, ad group or campaign. Every time AdWords drives a user to a goal completion page on your site that conversion will be recorded. With some code adjustments you can also record the value of the conversion (e.g. donation amount or shopping basket total). N.B. these conversions only show up in your AdWords dashboard, and if you have several goals it’s quite hard to distinguish which goal was completed.

Good for: Grant accounts with one specific purpose e.g. purchasing from your shop. Requires simple code change to one page, so good if you have limited technical resource.
Not so good if: you have multiple conversions to record, or you’re interested in a user’s journey through your site from clicking an ad to converting.

Find out more here.

Goal tracking in Google Analytics
This is perhaps the best way of tracking the success of your Google Grant-funded AdWords campaigns, and also allows you to judge other marketing efforts against the same goals you judge your AdWords activity by. You can also measure the effectiveness of each stage in your conversion process (e.g. a shop checkout) using the funnel visualisation feature. If you are tracking this way you would find all stats in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Good for: anyone wanting to get serious about measuring RoI and site performance across all channels including the Google Grant.
Not so good if: You are short on time and technical resource for implementation.

Find out more here.

Barriers to tracking

Having processes hosted across different domains or subdomains.
As a user arrives on your site from a Google Grant ad, their session will be labelled as such. If you then force that user to leave the domain / subdomain for another in order to complete a goal, their session labels will change. It will appear as though goal completions originated in the previous subdomain, not your Grant ads. This makes comparing ad spend to completed goals difficult.
You will need to customise your Analytics code to ensure the correct session information remains attached to a user as they navigate across your domains / subdomains.

Find out more here.

Inability to set up goals correctly in Google Analytics
We see loads of Analytics accounts where goals are set up but not working. There are tons of help resources online for setting up goals correctly, although often you will need to use regular expressions to get these correct. One top tip is to always speak to your developer about the various pages a user could see upon pressing “submit” or “donate now” in order to make sure you aren’t missing any key conversions.

Find out more here.

Next time... I'll be talking about tailoring campaigns for seasonal topics and how to compete in very competitive keyword markets - for instance, how to stand out via PPC and sign up London Marathon runners.

Click for more on the tailored management and insight service Chameleon Net offer to organisations receiving the Google Grant.