Google has just announced that you can now use your Analytics Goals in Adwords.
Ostensibly, the reasoning as this opens up the Goals that you use in Analytics to analysis in Conversion Optimizer . My guess is that Conversion Optimizer is quite an underused tool and this is another way to plug it for Google. It is a great tool, and a lot of sites could do with the help it could give, but it is rarely used.
However, what is more interesting to me (partly because we’ve been talking about conversion tracking in Google Adwords recently in the office), is that this changes the onus from the code insertion type of conversion to a simpler page name based tracking. Page based tracking does have its pitfalls, particularly if your form submits to itself and doesn’t change URL, but it is a far more common form of tracking. It is used in both Google Analytics and our own Apollo Analytics that feeds into our search marketing system.
Last year, Google removed the requirement for the text that used to appear when you added the conversion code from Adwords.
What I’m not sure about is how the counts will work when you link the two together – at the moment, Analytics and Adwords count conversions differently. But there is no reason why this shouldn’t continue if Analytics and Adwords are passing data to each other about visitors.
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