Inaccurate Adwords conversion data

Maybe it's the shopping cart, or?

[lioness]

I'm finding the Adwords conversion data to be way off. Adwords shows our # of sales conversion to be about 1/5 of our actual # of sales, on a daily basis. We are pretty confident the bulk of our sales are coming from Google Adwords, due to the drop in sales when we turn off Adwords. Currently, we are spending hundreds of $$ per day on Adwords.

I'm trying to find the root cause of the problem. So far, I have narrowed it down to 2 possible reasons:

1. Adwords does say that the conversion rate may be somewhat lower than expected:
[adwords.google.com...]

2. The shopping cart. Currently, we are using Mals free shopping cart. It (theoretically) is set up to track the google conversion code, but it doesn't seem to be working. Two emails sent to the owner on this issue have gone unanswered, so that seems to be a dead end.

So, my questions are:

1. Is anyone else having success tracking Adword conversions using Mals shopping cart?

2. Can anyone think of what else it might be, other than it's time to upgrade to a different shopping cart? Reading through the posts on wbm, it seems that most folks are tracking their own conversions regardless of the Google Adword stats.

3. If it is, indeed, time to upgrade the shopping cart, recommendations?

[AdWordsAdvisor]

lioness, I have to admit that I am not familiar with the Mals free shopping cart, so I'm probably not the best person to field your question - but IMO the long and short of it is if you can see the image on your conversion page, then you should be tracking accurately.

Have you actually gone through the process of buying (or signing up, or...) to see whether the image is showing on your conversion page?

I hope others on the forum will have some insight for you as well, as mine is rather limited.

AWA

[lioness]

Yes, the image is showing up. The problem is that our Adwords account is showing about 1/5 of the actual conversions we are getting. I haven't heard/read of any other complaints w/ Google Conversion tracking, so that's what leads me to believe the problem has to do w/ the shopping cart.

[pixel_juice]

I don't think you should have any problems with Mals e if it is setup correctly - I've tracked conversions using that in the past (with an image on thank you pages). You'd probably be best off posting your question on their forum.

[eWhisper]

If you have a lot of images, or a slow loading Thank you page where your Google image resides, sometimes a user will close the page before everything loads. In these cases, moving the image near the top of the page might give you some better data.

[lioness]

I have posted to the mals forum twice, but no joy.

The Thank you page is devoid of images, and it loads quickly.

[roitracker]

There is another possibility: some of the sales may not be coming from AdWords at all.

A "drop in sales when we turn off Adwords" is a dangerous conclusion to reach without data to back it up. What do your log files say?

[lioness]

You are absolutely correct. It's a blind conclusion which may not be correct. I need to continue to play w/ test orders to see if that's the case.

There was a glitch w/ our hosting and the stats for March and April are pretty much unavailable to us. That was one of the 1st things I tried to investigate.

Thank you everyone for your help. It's given me some new ideas to look into.