Conversion tracking in Adwords is possibly the most effective and significant way to track and optimise your campaign performance. Sometimes however, it just doesn’t work well.

Aside from technical issues that actually skew the results, conversion tracking consistently returns results which differ from other stats sources, such as say Google Analytics.

Don’t worry, this isn’t a source for panic. Its widely accepted that pretty much all stats packages are inaccurate to some extent or another. The data you are gathering is still very useful.

There are a couple of ways to get the best value from your stats if they are coming from a few different sources. They both mean deciding on a baseline:

• Work out an equation for average values across the stats packages and work with that. Lots of professionals in the murky world of analytics do this, and it works well for them.
• Decide on one set of data, trust this and work with it.

If you are working with Google Adwords and Analytics, there is a simple fix for this. Set up an import of your Analytics Goals and Transactions into Adwords Conversion Tracking. This way you are using your Analytics Goals as Conversions, and you have a consistent baseling to optimise from.

Your boss or clients will love you too as there will be no confusing differences in conversion stats from the two packages.

You can find out how to do the import here.

It takes between 48 hours and two weeks to get the import running, so plan ahead if you are going to implement this.