How To Track Your Adwords Campaigns For Free

What an exciting time it is to be an internet marketer. The internet has changedour lives so much these last ten years and it is revolutionizing the way we advertise. Before the internet it was very difficult to track the success of your advertising campaigns with any degree of accuracy. If you chose to advertise with tv, radio, billboards, yellow pages etc., it was impossible to track the effectiveness of your campaigns. In the past companies have spent billions of dollars on ineffective advertising due to the fact that they couldn't track results accurately.

Now all that has been changing rapidly because of the growth of the internet and all of the advantages it has to offer as an advertising tool. There are many tracking tools you can use to track your online campaigns. I am going to talk about 2 that are absolutely free (if you have an Adwords account).

Google Conversion Tracker

It is available in your Adwords account if you set up a piece of simple code in your website. It will tell you what campaigns and keywords are getting sales, leads, or pageviews depending on how you want to track your visitors. An e-commerce store would probably define their conversion as a sale. When a customer buys something conversion tracker would track the sale and the keyword, adgroup and campaign the sale came from.

A loans site would define a conversion as lead and Conversion Tracker would track who filled out the loan application and what keyword, adgroup and campaign the conversion came from. A business that wanted traffic to go to a special page on their site would be able to track how many people went to the page and the keyword, adgroup and campaign that produced the pageview.

The second tracking tool we will talk about is the mother load of all free tracking tools.

Google Analytics

A very powerful web analytics software. Google analytics gives you a lot of detailed info. It will track all of your campaigns not just Adwords campaigns.

You can set it up to track natural search listings, Yahoo/Overture, other pay per click campaigns, referrals, banner ads, article marketing efforts, it will track pretty much anywhere you are receiving traffic from including offline campaigns.

It is easy to set up put a piece of java code all ready written for you by Google into the pages of your site. You will learn things like who is visiting your website and where are they coming from? US, Canada, UK?

How many pageviews is your site getting? How many visitors are leaving your site immediately? How many visitors are returning to your site? How many times are these visitors returning to your site?

It will also tell you which campaigns are getting the sales, and how long visitors are staying on your website. It can tell you which pages are drawing in your visitors and which aren't.

Google Analytics will tell you all of this and much more. It will tell you what is working well and what isn't with your website. You take this information and keep what works and tweak what needs some improving. Google Analytics is a must have for a serious internet marketer and it is totally free. The drawback is the time you have to wait from signing up to finally getting your account. It took me about 2 months and my contacts have told me that although wait time can vary due to supply and demand, 2 months is about average.