Smart Goals: Google’s Answer to no AdWords Conversion Tracking

As an AdWords account manager, one of the first things you should check on a legacy account is whether or not conversion tracking is set up, whether or not it is implemented correctly, whether or not it is measuring what is important to be measured, and whether or not the tags are active or in working order. The number of Google AdWords accounts that do not have conversion tracking set up, or set up properly, is simply stunning.

Google’s answer to the vast number of AdWords account without conversion tracking set up? Smart Goals.

Smart Goals use aggregated conversion data from Google Analytics-enabled sites for advertisers that do not have a way to track and optimize their websites for conversions.

Smart Goals are driven by Google Analytics and intended to assist businesses that either do not have a way to measure conversions or are simply not doing it. Thousands of advertisers fall into this category.

This Smart Goal technology is an outgrowth of machine learning, which we has been increasingly in the news, which learns using anonymized conversion data of thousands of other websites that have opted in to share. From that information Google is able to distill dozens of key factors that have a statistical correlation with the likelihood to convert. Some examples of these key factors are session duration, pages per session, location, device, and browser.

So what to do if you want in on these Smart Goals? Very simply, you need only link your Analytics and AdWords accounts. You’ll find the Smart Goals under the Goals section in the Admin tab of your Google Analytics account.

Once activated, you’ll be able to preview how well the Smart Goals model is working for your particular website before actually importing them into AdWords. If everything looks good, you can import into AdWords and set a target cost per acquisition (CPA) with your Smart Goal as the acquisition. Google says: “In this way, you’re able to optimize your AdWords spend based on the likelihood of conversion as determined by our model.”

Smart Goals will be released gradually over the next few weeks. In order for your account to be eligible the particular Google Analytics view you’re activating them for has to get at least a thousand clicks from your AdWords campaigns over a rolling 30-day period in order to help ensure the sample size is large enough and the data is valid.

You can learn more from Google’s help guide here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6153083

For more information regarding this topic and search engine optimization in general head on over to Search Land Insider. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter @webmarketmagnet if you’d like more of his work!