Click here to download Adwords Editor

Related posts:

1. Adwords Editor 7.6.1 Released – Go Get It

I was just prompted to grab the update as soon as I opened Adwords Editor, so just launch the application to get up to date.

Changes for this version:

• Ad scheduling and advanced location targeting (radius targeting, excluded locales and city combinations)
• Ability to update multiple campaigns at once
• Adds support for YouTube promoted video ads (anyone having success with these?)
• Checkboxes to update different campaigns and/or specific ad groups across multiple campaigns at once

If you’re managing 1 or 100 Adwords campaigns and still haven’t picked up the Editor yet, use this as your excuse to get it. It makes managing large campaigns and thousands of keywords a LOT easier.

Google release notes: Adwords Editor 7.6.1

No related posts.

This may shock you, but a large part of winning the pay-per-click marketing game has to do with how much you pay per click.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to setting pay-per-click bids: position-based and economics-based. This will be a quick summary of both models and an argument for why I believe you must follow one of the schools over the other if you want to truly maximize the performance of your Google Adwords and other PPC campaigns.

A common-sense approach

Let’s forget about pay-per-click marketing for a second and take a quick look at how we make decisions concerning prices in all other aspects of our life.

If I told you I was buying a used car for $4,500, then asked you if you thought it was a good deal, you would probably say something like, “What’s the Blue Book?” You would need to know what it’s actually worth before knowing if the price is right… right?

Similarly, if you’re looking to buy an investment propery and your realtor calls you and says “Hey, I’ve got this great house on the market for only $425,000,” would you be able to confidently buy it over the phone right then? Of course not. You would first need to estimate the actual value of the property as accurately as you could before you knew if the price made sense.

Now, pretend for a second you know nothing about pay-per-click marketing, Google Adwords, quality scores etc. and just answer this question: How much should you bid for any given click?

The correct response that a successful marketer should give is: “It depends… what’s the click worth?”

Makes sense, right?

Here’s the dirty little secret: a large majority of marketers do not ask that question. It’s not because they are lazy pay-per-click managers (although that’s definitely the case for some); but because they subscribe to the “position-based” school of bid management.

What is “position-based” bidding?

“Position” refers to the position that your ad appears relative to other ads on the search results page.

The general rule: the higher your ad is on the page, the more your ad will get clicked. It will have a higher click through rate and bring more traffic to your website, resulting in more leads/sales for your business.

With Google Adwords (Yahoo & MSN have similar systems), your ad’s position is determined by the following equation: CPC bid x Quality Score.

Quality score is Google’s somewhat-secret sauce that is a number 1-10 given to your ad based on it’s CTR and relevancy to the keyword and to your landing page. Getting a high quality score is an important topic, and one that an entire e-book could be written on (and a few have been). For now we’re talking about bid management, so the factor we’re interested in is the CPC bid.

Position-based bidders believe that there is a “sweet spot” position on the page for every keyword in their campaigns, and they will adjust their bids accordingly in an effort to keep their ads showing in that position consistently.

You’ll often hear position-based bidders say things like…

• “Positions 4 through 6 are the most profitable spots to be on the page. You’ll still get solid traffic without paying the premium for the 1 through 3 spots.”
• “Positions 1 through 3 drive a lot more conversions than lower positions, so we’re going to keep bidding high to keep our ads up there.”
• “If you’re ad isn’t showing on the first page then you need to raise your bids to make sure you’re getting traffic.”

Are these guys right? Do some positions lead to better conversions? Is one position truly better or worse than another?

Everything wrong with position-based bidding

Almost as if they were the ones managing your Adwords account, position-based bidding lets your competitors decide how much you bid.  When your competitors’ bids go up, yours have to go up to keep your ads in the same position.

This is a problem for two big reasons:

1. Your competitors have different economic models than you. Just because a lead may be worth $10 to one of your competitors doesn’t mean it’s worth $10 for you. If you have a better sales funnel than they do, that lead could be worth $15, 20, even $50 for your business…
2. There’s a good chance your competitors simply don’t know what the hell they’re doing, especially when it comes to pay-per-click bid management of all things. This makes bidding based on position often a true case of the “blind leading the blind.”

Additionally, let’s dispel a myth — different positions on the page do not have different conversion rates. Sure, you may get more conversions in position 1 vs. position 5, but that’s only because you get more clicks the higher you are on the page. The actual percentage of those clicks that convert into customers does not change. (Here’s a report on the subject released by Google in Aug. ‘09: Conversion Rates Don’t Vary Much with Ad Position)

A return to common sense: economics-based bidding

Bidding based on economics simply means determining your bids by asking the age-old question, “What’s it worth?”

Applied to PPC, that means looking at every keyword and asking, “How much is a click for this keyword worth to my business?”

Notice that this is a fundamentally different question than asking, “How much are my competitors paying for this click?” or “Where will I show up on the page for this keyword?”

None of these things matter when it comes to deciding how to set your CPC bids. Once you know click’s value to your business, figure out the price you’re willing to pay for that value and that’s your bid. It’s that simple.

A quick example

If you’re bidding on “widget,” and your data shows 15% of people who click on your ad after searching for “widget” end up buying your $50 product, and you’re willing to spend 10% of sales on advertising, then your numbers for keyword “widget” look like:

• Conversion rate: 15%
• Sale value: $50
• A/S (Advertising/Sales ratio): 10%

To get the value of the click, we multiply your product’s sale value by the keyword’s conversion rate.

Click value = Conv. Rate * Sale Value

In our example, the value of a click for keyword “widget” = $50 x 15%, or $7.50.

To determine how much you should bid per click, multiply the click’s value by your A/S ratio.

Your bid = Click Value * A/S

In our example, your max CPC bid for “widget” = $7.50 x 10%, or .75 cents.

Position is irrelevant

Once you have set your bids using the economic model, you don’t need to worry about position. If your ad’s in position 1, great!

What if your ad drops off the page to position 12? Oh well. That means the current economics of your business (sale price, profit margin) combined with effectiveness of your sales funnel (conversion rate) aren’t enough for your ad to profitably display on the first page.

Does this mean you should raise your bid? Nope.

Does it mean you’ll be off the first page forever? Not by a long shot.

Maybe a handful of your competitors for that keyword are operating at a loss (especially if they’re using the position-based method). Once their money runs out and/or they finally realize it’s unprofitable for them too, they’ll drop their bid. If enough competitors do this, then all of a sudden your bid is high enough to be appearing in position 8 or 9.

What’s important is not your position, but that you have a bid that makes economic sense for your unique business and sales funnel.

Use the economic-based method to set your bids and you can be sure that wherever your ad shows up is exactly where it’s supposed to.

Related posts:

1. How Adwords' "Dynamic Keyword Insertion / DKI" Works
2. 9 Tips For Writing Irresistibly Click-able AdWords Headlines

This year’s conference just ended, and the grand prize winner is RedBeacon, a company that is like a Yelp for local businesses.

People can use the site to search for local businesses in their area and are then presented with a list of featured businesses along with user reviews.

The company was founded by ex-Google engineers and product managers.

So today, some of the technology’s best minds got together and bet on a theory that most have come to view as inevitable: the way people find local businesses online is going to continue to change a lot in the coming years.

The internet has done a miraculous job of connecting the world, but we are still figuring out how to connect people to their plumbers next door. As solutions like AdWords (and perhaps RedBeacon) emerge, it’s hard to say which model will come out on top, but you can be sure that forward-thinking business owners will be there to reap the huge rewards that come with showing up early to the party.

Most small businesses owners haven’t yet figured out how to really harness the power of Google AdWords to drive traffic to their website and customers to their door. The businesses that have gotten themselves a steady stream of AdWords traffic have found that being a small fish in a big pond can be very profitable if their competitors haven’t had the courage or know-how to test the water.

Have you experimented with any new avenues for your online marketing recently? Have you stepped into the AdWords arena, or have you been waiting on the sidelines while your competitors figure out how to utilize this platform to make more money than they ever could before?

I don’t know what’s going to be the local business finder of the future, but what I can tell you is that there is a business owner down the street from you who is making very real money on AdWords as you’re reading this.

Whether that means opening an Adwords account today yourself, going back to one that’s been collecting dust, or finding a knowledgeable AdWords professional to outsource your campaign to, there’s no better time to start becoming comfortable with the change that is sure to continue sweeping local business search.

Just ask RedBeacon.

Related posts:

1. Google Introduces Pay-Per-Call to Adwords Mobile Ads
2. 9 Tips For Writing Irresistibly Click-able AdWords Headlines
3. Is Google Split Testing a New 'Search' Button?

You may have heard about this Adwords trick, also known as “DKI” if you’re a really cool industry insider. Here’s how it works: you insert {keyword} in your headline, and then Google changes your headline on the fly to exactly match the keywords that people search for.

For instance, let’s say you’re selling gingerbread cookies. You put {keyword} in your headline, target the keyword “gingerbread” and let it fly. Someone searches for “gingerbread houses.” Guess what your ad’s headline is? Gingerbread Houses.

What if their search term is longer than 25 characters? What if they searched for “the most awesome gingerbread houses ever”? Unfortunately that’s too long to be your headline. Here’s what you do: instead of just running with {keyword}, you set your headline as {keyword:Best Gingerbread}. Now, if your ad is triggered by a search phrase longer than 25 characters, you have told Google to display your headline as “Best Gingerbread.” Cool, right?

Sort of. DKI is popular because it’s a no-brainer way to make sure that your headline contains your searchers’ keywords. That being said, don’t get married to it…

Dynamic keyword insertion encourages poor market research. I recommend finding the top 10 high traffic keywords that are relevant to your business and getting those “stories” down pat. By getting the story down, I mean writing entire ads (not just headlines) that focus on each specific keyword, then creating landing pages to match each one.

You can’t do this with DKI, because who knows what your headline is going to be?

You’d be better off with an ad all about gingerbread houses that leads to a landing page with some awesome pictures like this:

What is your opinion about dynamic keyword insertion? Has it worked for you in your campaigns? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. 9 Tips For Writing Irresistibly Click-able AdWords Headlines
2. Position-Based vs. Economics-Based PPC Bidding

An AdWords headline can only consist of 25 characters. That’s 82% shorter than the maximum length of a Twitter message.

The headline also happens to be the most important line of your ad. If your headline doesn’t grab searchers’ attention as they quickly scan a Google search results page, your ad will go unseen. That means you have a very short window of opportunity to make those 25 characters count.

Here are nine guidelines to writing headlines that will give your ads the highest probability of being clicked on.

1. Don’t use your company’s name.

This is a big one that I see a lot of small businesses get wrong. Unless your company is a household name like Amazon, Walmart or Coca Cola, don’t waste your precious headline space by announcing the name of your company.

The only people who will recognize your company name and click on your ad are those who are already aware of your business and are probably already a lead or, even worse, a current customer themselves.

And for those who have never heard of you? They don’t care what your company’s called. They just want to know if you can solve their problem. By using a headline that doesn’t grab their attention, they will probably never get the chance to find out.

2. If you’re a local business, mention the location you’re serving.

If you’re a dermatologist in Nashville, Tennessee, put “Nashville” in your headline. Remember, it’s all about grabbing the searcher’s attention. You have to make the headline as relevant to them as humanly possible. What better way to do this then to put their location in big blue letters right at the top of your ad?

By the way… if you’re doing this make sure you’re geotargeting your ads OR all of your keywords include “nashville.”

3. Use emotional trigger keywords.

Cheap. Free. Fast. Limited Time. Special. Now. You.

These are all words that evoke emotion in people. Human beings may be complicated, but we have the simplest triggers that get our attention and compel us to take action. Use them to your advantage and your ad is more likely to be clicked on.

4. Include the price of your product or service.

If you’re beating most of your competitors when it comes to price, don’t be afraid to put it right there in your headline with a shiny dollar sign in front of it. Most other advertisers won’t be doing this.

5. Try reverse psychology.

“Don’t Buy < x >,” “Don’t Try < x >.” Replace x with your product or service. If you use this technique, in line one of your ad you should lead with something like “Unless you buy from us.” This will almost certainly stand out against other ads in your industry (unless your industry is internet marketing).

6. Make an outrageous claim.

“Acne Free In 3 Days.” I haven’t checked to make sure that’s 25 characters or less but you get the point. Make a bold claim, but make sure that your landing page backs it up… Google actually has rules about this. You don’t need scientific reports (necessarily), just be sure you have some info on the page that supports your claim.

7. Put it in quotation marks.

“Studies have shown” that human beings’ eyes are “drawn to quotation marks. “

“See” what I mean?

8. Use at least part of your keywords in the headline.

If you’re bidding on the keyword “gourmet catering,” don’t just run an ad with a headline that says “Food Delivery.” You want to use at least one of the keywords in your headline for two reasons: one, because any words that match the Googler’s search term will be displayed in bold (ex. “Fast Catering”), and two, the word is more likely to catch the searchers’ eye because it is exactly what she searched for.

9. Use symbols $#@*-!

The majority of advertisers don’t use symbols in their headlines. Using a few where appropriate can make your headline stand out as searchers scan the page. Note that I mean “where appropriate” very loosely… I test pretty much all of my headlines with a question mark at the end at some point.

Photo credit: try_to_touch

Related posts:

1. How Adwords' "Dynamic Keyword Insertion / DKI" Works
2. Google Introduces Pay-Per-Call to Adwords Mobile Ads
3. How The Huffington Post Utilizes The Awesome Power of Split Testing

How do I know?

In Adwords campaign settings, Google gives users two options for ad rotation:

• Optimize – ‘Show better performing ads more often.’ With this option, after a short amount of time Google takes the ad with the highest CTR and then gives it over 80% of the impressions, displaying it much more often than the other ad.
• Rotate – ‘Show ads more evenly.’ This tells Google to give each ad an equal number of impressions. Best for smart advertisers.

I recommend that as an advertiser you shouldn’t listen to Google’s recommendation to optimize your ads. Letting Google pick your best ads will kill your split tests before you collect enough data to truly declare a mathematical winner.

Despite this, Google has always set the default for this setting at “Optimize,” even going so far as to recommend it for new advertisers.

Recently, as of August ‘09 Google updated their Adwords web interface to make it even harder to change this ad rotation option.

In fact, if you’re setting up your new campaign settings before you write any ads, as I’m sure many do, it’s literally not an option for you.

Here’s a screenshot of the ad rotation setting for new, ad-less campaigns:

So, if showing your ads evenly is the best way to run split tests to get fast results, why doesn’t Google set this as the default?

I speculate about this and write about two other settings you should go against Google’s recommendation on for every new Adwords campaign you create in my post, “3 Adwords Settings You Must Change to Avoid Campaign Suicide.”

I recommend that as a smart advertiser you should set up your ads (or just create a test ad) and change this ad rotation setting to “Standard,” giving all of your ads an even shot at becoming winners for your campaign.

Related posts:

1. 3 Adwords Settings You Must Change To Avoid Campaign Suicide
2. Is Google Split Testing a New 'Search' Button?
3. How The Huffington Post Utilizes The Awesome Power of Split Testing

When launching a new Google Adwords campaign there are a few default settings that you need to change right out of the box in order to maximize your campaign’s performance.

Let’s get started, beginning with the most important setting:

1. Search network / Content network

By default, Google sets up your Adwords campaign to advertise on both the search network and the content network.

In offline advertising, this would be the equivalent of carefully crafting three television ads, handing them to the studio and then having them tell you “hey, we’re gonna take the audio from these and run some radio ads on our affiliate station and charge you for those too, cool?”

No, it’s not cool. Just like radio and TV, the search network and content network are inherently different animals and unique care needs to be taken when creating a campaign for either network. Don’t hand Google more money until you know exactly why you’re doing it and what you’ll get back.

While search ads are only displayed to people who are typing the keywords you’ve targeted into Google and are actively searching for whatever you’re advertising, content network ads are true “interruption” marketing and are shown to people all over the web who have displayed no intention of seeking out your product or service other than visiting a website with some of your targeted keywords on it.

Not only do you need to create separate plans of attack, the statistics and success metrics for the search and content network are completely different. By creating a single campaign and having it run on both, you’re combining two giant advertising platforms into one even bigger mess of data that will be incredibly frustrating to sift through.

On the search network, click-through-rates (CTR) generally hover between 1-5%. On the content network, a CTR of 0.3% could mean you’re making a lot of money. See why you don’t want both of these networks dumping stats into the same place?

Plus, you want to know where your conversions are coming from. Maybe you lose money hand-over-fist on the content network, but the search network gives you a 320% ROI. It will be harder to know without splitting up the campaigns.

Don’t listen to Google. Keep the ratio of networks and campaigns at 1:1.

2. Standard/Accelerated Delivery

When it comes to Adwords, just like all other marketing methods, testing is everything. In my opinion, the thing that makes Google Adwords the number one online advertising platform is Google’s incredibly large reach/market-share that lets you get the fastest marketing test results available in the world today.

Thanks to Adwords you can quickly know if a product is worth creating, doubling down on or ditching just by targeting some relevant keywords and writing a few ads. No clicks? Forget about it… either your idea about who your target market is is wrong, there is no demand for your product or service, or both.

(Or maybe you’re just not good at picking keywords and writing ad copy. If that’s the case, let me do it for you as part of my all-inclusive PPC management services package).

Google excels here because Adwords compresses the one factor that is the enemy of all marketers: time. The faster you get statistically significant test results, the faster you can make adjustments to your business or improvements to your ad copy. If you make these changes faster than your competitors, you win. If it’s vice-versa, you’ll be left in the dust. That is the reality of the current Adwords landscape for many industries today.

Accelerated ad delivery helps with this by telling Google to run your ads as quickly as possible. It’s an instruction from you to take the speed governor off of your Adwords campaign and just let it fly and see what happens.

If I had to guess, I think Google defaults new campaigns to “standard” delivery because they don’t want new advertisers blowing their ad budget in the first couple hours at the start of every day, getting discouraged and then closing their accounts.

You’ve heard the saying “you can sheer a sheep many times, but skin it only once”? Google doesn’t want to skin you your first day in the game; if your campaign isn’t performing, they want to give you time to learn what you’re doing wrong and correct it before your entire budget is in their pocket and you walk away from the table forever.

Good poker players know you never take a sucker for all of his cash in a single sitting.

I could be wrong. Regardless, if you’re serious about Adwords, hit the accelerated delivery button and don’t look back.

3. Optimized / Even Ad Rotation

As I stated above, in order to beat your competitors on Adwords you need to be constantly improving your campaigns.

In my opinion the best way to do this is by continually split testing two or more ads against each other for every ad group in your account, then acting on the test results on a daily basis. (This is also one of the many things I take care of for you under my PPC management services package).

This provides a great opportunity for a smart advertiser like you  (hey, you’re reading my blog, right?) to get ahead of your competitors, because Google’s data shows that the majority of advertisers on Adwords aren’t split testing their ads and aren’t making daily adjustments once the tests are done.

I know this because the default ad rotation setting for new Adwords campaigns is “Optimize,” which lets Google pick a winning ad for you.

If you keep Google’s default and let them “optimize” your ads for you, after a short period of time Google will declare your split test is over, pick the ad with the highest CTR at the given moment, and then show it way more often than any other ads you’ve written for your ad group.

Google’s “optimized” setting doesn’t give your ads time to fail on their own. This poses a big problem for intelligent pay-per-click marketers who wait for statistically significant test data before making changes to their ads.

If you write two ads and after 24 hours you look at the reports and see that the first ad received 4 clicks while the other received 2, would you call off the split test and crown the first ad the winner? Of course you wouldn’t, because you don’t have enough data to show that the first ad will beat the second in the long run.

It would be like flipping a coin, watching it land on heads 3 times in a row and then stating you’re certain that heads will beat tails in the long term.

You have to wait to collect enough data so that you can be 95% statistically certain that one ad will outperform the other if they both ran for eternity.

The only way you can be absolutely (okay, 95%) certain that one ad will beat another is by running their stats through this equation:

Look at that equation and you can see that split testing your ads by hand, and doing it the right way, can be a lot of work. Google doesn’t trust you to do this work, and how could they?

Thankfully I don’t do this by hand.

The tool I use every day for this is called WinnerAlert. This thing is invaluable to my business. Every day it gathers statistics for every single ad in every ad group in every campaign in my account (and my clients’ accounts), runs them all through that scary looking statistics equation, and then alerts me via email only when a test has been completed.

You can see how powerful this is. It only emails me when I need to take action by writing another ad. Once I do, WinnerAlert automatically starts the test all over again.

However, there is a small monthly fee for this service. If you spend over $200 a month on Adwords I would argue that it’s well worth it, but I want to provide you with a free tool that does the same thing, although a lot slower and not on autopilot like WinnerAlert (you have to input the data yourself): SplitTester.com.

Why doesn’t Google build a tool like WinnerAlert? Maybe they’re working on it. And maybe, once it’s finished, they’ll trust you to split test your ads the right way.

Until then, be smart: go against Google’s recommendation and handle your own split testing.

Your campaign’s click-through-rate and return-on-investment will thank you for it.

Have any questions? Post them in the comments!

Related posts:

1. Hey, Adwords Advertiser: Google Thinks You Suck At Split Testing Ads
2. How To Stop Showing Your AdWords Content Network Ads On Parked Domains
3. Why Yahoo's $100 Million Ad Campaign Would Be Better Spent Improving Their PPC Advertising Platform

Odds are you’ve run across a parked domain yourself while surfing the web. A parked domain is a page that has nothing but ads on it and serves no other purpose than to get ad clicks. When webmasters purchase a domain but don’t have time to focus on developing it right away, they will use one of the many domain parking services out there to put up a page of ads on the site with the hopes of generating a little revenue while it sits there.

Parked domains are frequently used as annoying pop-ups or pop-unders. Sometimes people will even run AdWords campaigns that go straight to parked domains, hoping to make more money from the ads on the site being clicked than Google charges them for their campaign. In the pay-per-click business, this is called arbitrage.

A lot of these parked domains run Google AdSense, which means that the ads displayed on their site are paid for by people like yourself who are running campaigns on the content network. You don’t want this to be you — these clicks convert horribly and will almost surely cost you money.

Thankfully, Google knows a lot of advertisers hate parked domains and out of the goodness of their hearts they have made it easy to block your ads from showing up on them.

Here’s how:

1. Sign in to AdWords. Click on Tools -> More Tools.

2. Click Site and Category Exclusion.

3. Select your content network campaign from the drop-down box

4. Click the Page Types tab.

5. Check the Parked domains box to exclude these pages from showing your ads. From this screen you can block your ads from showing on other categories of pages as well, such as error pages and image-sharing pages. Depending on your business, I would generally recommend blocking error pages and parked domains at the minimum.

Page Categories You Can Exclude On The Adwords Content Network

Google’s content network is a great way to turn on traffic to your website. You’ll get a lot more eyeballs (impressions) on your ads versus advertising on the AdWords search network, simply because of there are so many publishers on the web who are monetizing their sites with Google AdSense.

But it’s a jungle out there, and unless you are only buying space on a few specific sites (the content network lets you choose the sites by hand if you’d like), you need to keep an eye on where your ads are showing up.

Blocking your ads from showing on low-quality traffic sites like parked domains will help increase your CTR and stop you from wasting money on the content network.

Related posts:

1. 3 Adwords Settings You Must Change To Avoid Campaign Suicide
2. TC50 Winner 'RedBeacon' Points to Local Search Evolving… Are You Prepared?
3. Position-Based vs. Economics-Based PPC Bidding

With this information, you can do a lot.

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Tool

Let’s say you have a form on your Wordpress site that sends users to a ‘Thank You’ page after they fill it out, which isn’t linked to from anywhere else on your site. The only way they can reach this page is by filling out the form. By placing AdWords conversion tracking on that page, you can see exactly which keywords people searched for who ended up clicking on your ad and filling out your form.

From here on out, anyone who fills out the form is counted as a successful lead conversion by AdWords, allowing you to go into your reports and see what keywords are creating value for your business. You then can take a number of actions: up your cost-per-click bid on keywords that are converting, create SEO campaigns around those keywords, build out additional products/services around those keywords, etc.

You can see how powerful this is.

Wordpress is my favorite content management system (CMS) for building websites. It’s free, easy, and you can get up and running very fast. I’ll get more into why I love Wordpress in a later post, but for now, let’s take the above example and assume you have a form on a Wordpress site that you’d like to start tracking with Google Conversion Tracking.

Seems simple enough, right? Just copy and paste Google’s conversion tracking code onto the ‘Thank You’ Wordpress page. But there’s a problem — Google’s tracking code is written in a language called Javascript, and Wordpress doesn’t like it when you place Javascript inside pages.

However, Javascript plays fine with Wordpress when you place it within the template files themselves. For example, you can place any type of Javascript code at the bottom of your theme’s footer.php and everything will work great.

But when it comes to conversion tracking, we can’t just put the code in the footer because it would be loaded with every page on your site and count a visit to any page as a conversion.

I outline two solutions below. The first is the preferred method, with an alternative method to follow.

Preferred method: Create a custom Wordpress page template for your ‘Thank You’ page that includes the tracking code.

Here are the steps:

1. Using an FTP client, log-in to where your Wordpress site is hosted. Navigate to /wp-content/themes/yourtheme, with ‘yourtheme’ being the name of the active theme on your site.

2. Download page.php and open it in your favorite HTML editor. Then, place this code at the very top of the page:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Thanks
*/
?>

3. At the bottom of the page, paste your Google Conversion Tracking code right before this tag:

4. Save the file as thanks.php and using your FTP client, upload it to your /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/ folder.

5. Log in to your Wordpress admin panel and Edit the ‘Thank You’ page. On the right-hand side of this screen, under Attributes you should now see a Template drop-down box. Click the box and select Thanks.

6. Click Update Page and you’re done!

Alternative method: Create a copy of your ‘Thank You’ page and save it as it’s own PHP file with Google’s conversion tracking code placed at the bottom of it.

Here are the steps:

1. Navigate to your site’s ‘Thank You’ page in your web browser and select View Source Code. (In Internet Explorer, click View > Source from the drop-down menu. In Firefox, click View > Page Source).

2. Copy and paste all of the source code to a new file in your favorite HTML editor. You can do this by right-clicking anywhere in the source code and clicking Select All, then right-clicking again and clicking Copy.

3. Within your HTML editor, paste your page’s source code. Then, paste the Google Conversion Tracking Code at the bottom, right above

</body>

4. Save the file as thank-you.php.

5. Connect to your website with your favorite FTP client and upload the file to your website’s root directory. (Note: your root directory is most likely the first folder that your FTP client takes you to when you connect. If you see another folder named wp-content, you are in the right directory.)

6. Test your page and make sure it loads and all of your links work correctly by going to http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you.php.

7. Set your form’s ‘Thank You’ page to point to http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you.php.

You’re done! This will work with both Google AdWords and Google Analytics conversion tracking. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments.

Related posts:

1. How To Track Form Submissions With Google Analytics Goals
2. How To Turn Any Link Into A Google Analytics Goal
3. Ditch Your Stone Age Business Email Address and Get a Contact Form