Tracking Google AdWords

If you're spending money on advertising online, you'll want to have an accurate way of telling whether those ads are effective for you. Because of the way Google AdWords work, referring URLs will not always be the most reliable way of judging how effective your Google AdWords are. Instead, here's what you need to do:

1) Determine how many groups of keywords you want to track

Basically, it's probably helpful to track each "Ad Group" individually. If you don't want to do this, you may want to consider tracking each "Campaign" that you are running individually. For this tutorial, I'm going to assume that you'll be tracking individual "Ad Groups"

2) Set up a unique URL for each Ad Group which you'll be tracking.

You set up duplicates of your home page. For example, if your home page is: http://www.mysite.com/index.html copy index.html and create a new page called http://www.mysite.com/Google1.html Then continue to copy the pages (Google2.html, Google3.html etc) All of these pages, when pulled up in a browser, can look exactly like your home page. You can, of course, use whichever name you like for the new pages. Just use something that helps you remember which Ad Group that particular page is tracking. It might help if you give your Ad Groups corresponding names like "Google1", "Google2" etc.

3) Insert unique WunderCounter into each of your new pages.

When you enter the page name of each page in the code generator, use the actual name of the HTML file (Google1.html, Google2.html,etc) This will also allow you to keep things clear when checking out your stats. Copy and paste the new counter code into each new page and upload the pages to your web site. Remember, these pages are only for AdWords, so you don't want any actual links on your site pointing at them. That will skew your stats and you *don't* want to do that when your money is involved. :-)

4) Login to your Google AdWords admin and change the URLs that your AdWord groups are pointing to.

Your first AdWord group (Google1) should link to http://www.mysite.com/Google1.html, the second group should link to http://www.mysite.com/Google2.html and so on

5) Test out your AdWords by clicking on the new links.

Login to your stats page and make sure the new pages that you've created are showing up. If they're not there, go over the steps again to ensure that you haven't missed anything.


This system should allow you to test various groups of AdWords. If you have a Premium account, once you have your AdWord traffic being tracked by various pages you can click on the page files (on the right side of your main stats page) and view the traffic to each individual page. Use the visitor "Isolate" function to follow the Google visitors through your web site. This will not only help you know how much traffic individual keywords drive to your site but it will also give you an idea as to how long these people are staying. If you see a lot of people leaving after hitting the first page you'll want to consider a) refining your choice of AdWords and b) refining the wording of your ads

This is just a quick starter, but it should point you in the right direction. Keep in mind that telephone support is also available. So, if you're having difficulties with this concept, someone can walk you through it over the phone.