Is anyone actually using or have used the conversion tracking provided by Google? The need for tracking is obvious but some insight may help others with smaller budgets get an idea of what tracking can do.

I think many of the more advanced SEOs use GoToast or similar advanced PPC tools.

Some probably use ConversionRuler to track the results across multiple engines all at one place.

I do not do a ton of PPC stuff yet though, and the free tool Google provides makes it easy to determine what keywords are successful and which ones aren't.

It will not only help you drop your bad words, but it will also help you figure out what words or word patterns may be worth bidding on.

By tracking you make it easy to know where return is comming from and where you are just wasting money.

Some people do not recommend using the Google site tracking information because they do not like sharing conversion information with outside sources (such as Google.)

It is simple, quick, free, and easy to use if you want to though. It even tracks conversions through third party payment processor sites (such as Clickbank)...at least it has tracked a few for me.

Okay I take that as one psoitive vote from an actual user.

Absolutely. As most professionals know, conversion is THE way to tell what the actual return is on the PPC investment. Being able to tell a client what keywords arent converting and what their cost per sale/lead/other desired action is, serves to reafirm to the client that 1) You are on top of their campaign 2) You are managing their money well 3) You care about their business and want them to succeed.

I think everyone here that is not in the new to the business stage has to use tracking of some kind.

And bringing this back to the topic ( :rolleyes: ) when you are first starting out and only working with Google you can use the program they have... I have actually thought of using it for one of our lesser sites, so they can see where things fall off, where Adsense carriers end up parsing the tracking code... and all the other problems we have been working with for the last few years.