Conversion 1-Per-Click Or Many-Per-Click?

May 4, 2010 – 10:52 pm

We know different campaign goals often require different success metrics. If you want to drive online purchases, you probably look at the total number of sales, so if one person buys three items from your web site, you’d want to count three sales. But if you’re measuring leads, you may care more about unique leads, so if the same person fills out a lead form three times on your site, you’d want to count them only once.

Today, I will be clarifying the conversion terminology on the AdWords Report Center and conversion tracking tool pages. “Conversions” columns are now labeled Conversions (1-per-click), while “Transactions” columns are now called Conversions (many-per-click). The current AdWords campaign management pages display 1-per-click conversions, so if one click leads to multiple conversions, they’re counted only once. On the other hand, many-per-click conversions count each conversion that occurs after a click on your ad.

Here’s an example to explain the difference: Let’s say you’re selling plumbing supplies online and you’ve set up conversion tracking on your “Thank You For Your Purchase” and your “Newsletter Subscription Confirmed” pages.

If a customer clicks on your ad, buys a plumbing device, then subscribes to your newsletter, you’ll see two many-per-click conversions, but just a single 1-per-click conversion in your account. If the same customer returns to your site a few days later and buys another tool (but doesn’t click on one of your AdWords ads to get there), you’ll now see three many-per-click conversions, but your 1-per-click conversions will still remain at one.

By focusing on many-per-click conversions, you may be able to more easily compare AdWords campaign performance with the performance of your other online advertising campaigns, since a lot of online ad serving and search campaign management tools use many-per-click conversions as the default conversion metric.

I hope these reporting changes to conversion tracking will make it simpler for you to manage your campaigns with a wide variety of advertising goals.