Tracking my ecommerce site via PPC

Google Analytics. We have 50,000 products and can track Adwords conversions easily.

Hi Gamermatt,

Sometimes the most obvious solution is the best solution.

I beleive your absolute best option is to use the AdWords conversion tracking feature. The main reason is that having that data within your AdWords account allows you to use that data to automate scripts. And using the AdWords tracking script does not prevent you from using any other tracking software. You can still use Google Analytics, which is designed from the ground up to integrate with AdWords, giving you even more detail in both you AdWords account as well as Google Analytics.

Google Analytics works well for tracking data from all other marketing campaigns, it's not just for Adwords. You can use Custom Campaigns to track results for any kind of campaign, on nearly any kind of platform.

Now there is one thing that Google Analytics is not good at and that is tracking individual visitor paths. Due to privacy concerns, Google analytics anonymizes data by only reporting aggregate visitor data. To gain further insight you will want to use an additional analytics package. A good option for more indepth visitor data is an open source program called Piwik.

For tracking Google analytic is best.

Thanks everyone - I have just went through the process of integrating adwords/analytics to track conversions and am playing around with it. Hopefully I can get some good conversion rates on ppc!

No! Don't use Google Analytics! dBurk said it best!

Google ADWORDS has the conversion TRACKING feature for a reason - so you know what your CONVERSIONS can be on your GOOGLE Adwords.

The great thing about the conversion tracker as well, is you can set a value to each conversion.

The implications of this is that you can use Google Adwords to 'optimize for conversions'.

What Adwords will do, once it has the data, is it will take your ads, keywords, and automatically adjust the bids so that it will raise the bids on those that will be more likely to convert a sale. It will also lower the bids on those that are LEAST likely to convert.

Then, if you tell Adwords that you have a target ROI, say, "I need to spend 40 dollars per customer that makes me 60 bucks" (So you have an ROI of 20 dollars) then Google does all it can to make sure you are at least making that goal.

It's a great, great feature! Use it!

Yea go with analytics if your using WP, Joomla, OScommerce etc
you'll find many plugins out there.

Guillermo-

Just be aware that using AdWords conversion tracking to measure AdWords' performance has a certain expected bias to it. Google will credit the AdWords ad for every sale it was involved in even if, before or after that ad click, the person came to your site through different ads/links/searches. Most people do not purchase things the first time they visit a site, and understanding the common funnels, and which channels are assisting discovery of your site versus closing sales, is very valuable data.

My recommendation:

(a) Do set up AdWords conversion tracking, as this lets you use the "optimize for conversions" bidding strategy, and that might be a good one for your campaign. Best to at least keep the option open.

(b) Do also set up a Google Analytics account. It's good to have general web stats on how people use your site (time on site, bounce rates, visit depths, etc) regardless of what conversion tracking you're doing. You can link it to your AdWords account and it'll pull in your campaign data.

(c) Consider also using a conversion tracking tool that's not affiliated with Google. This doesn't preclude you from using Google's, you'll use both. That gets you independent auditing so that you know Google (and other places you advertise with in the future) are not overbilling you, and more advanced tools help you understand how all your traffic sources are interacting to generate your sales. Most have plugins for common e-commerce platforms that will pick up your order totals and such without you adding any code manually.

(c) is especially important if you ever plan to run an affiliate program, to find affiliates that are sniping sales with malware, PPC bidding against policies, cookie stuffing, etc. Most e-commerce businesses can't afford to pay for every referral twice (once to buy the ads that really generated them, a second time to the affiliate that's stealing the visitor who's already about to be your customer).