During the course of discussions with a prospective client, the importance of conversion was stressed to me. I was delighted to hear this and wanted to find out more about current conversion levels and expectations. A conversion in this case was defined as the completion of a ‘contact us’ form and on average one per day was being received. The objective was to double this rate to 2 per day by improving the performance of the current AdWords campaign, whilst mantaining the current AdWords budget.

In order that I could assess my chances of meeting this challenge I asked for access to both the AdWords and Analytics accounts and set to work analysing the current performance. My first port of call was to use use a custome report I created a little while ago. This report simply uses the Metric ‘Total Goal Completions’ and the Dimension ‘Medium’. The report generates a view of all of the conversions resulting from organic, cpc, referral and direct traffic.

This was the beginning and end of my initial investigation as it showed that less that 5% of all conversions arose from cpc traffic! The prospective client had been convinced that his PPC campaign had been driving conversions, so was a little taken aback with my findings. Still the cost of the campaign is now being saved whilst next steps are being considered and a new approach to meeting the objectives is agreed.