How much does the conversion counter underestimates actual conversions

[derekwong28]

I am having problems in managing our adwords campaign. According to the counter, we are losing money on the ROI. However, everytime I turn down the max CPC, our orders plummets. I am sure that the adwords campaign is profitable but I cannot prove it.

I suspect that we are getting substantially more conversions than is actually reported by the counter. i.e. from customers who have disabled their cookies and also from content sites.

Does anybody have any figures on how much does the conversion counter underestimates actual conversions?

[Jenstar]

and also from content sites.

Adwords does seem to track conversions from content sites at this time - AdSense runs Adwords ads using the same conversion tracking URLs as the ads that appear in the serps for tracking conversions.

[paulewing]

I'm not currently using the conversion tool for a number of reasons so I'm not sure how it handles the cookies. If they are not persistant cookies, it will not pick up people that click through to your site, bookmark it, and then come back later to buy. Also it won't track things like a wife sending a sugestion to her husband for a gift or such. These are much harder to pin down. Some cane be figured out by analysing your logs, but a lot just fall into the "I have no idea where this sale came from" catagory.

[derekwong28]

We had conversions from google adsense from shopping.com and bizrate.com that have not shown up on the conversion counter. However, conversions from some adsense publishers do show up.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Great question, derekwong28, but pretty hard to quantify. My guess (and this is pure opinion, not based on research) is that the percentage of Google users who do not accept cookies is quite low. IMO, probably in the single digits.

BTW, Cookies are persistant - remaining for 30 days.

[Robsp]

derek,

We know that the actual conversions are most likely not reported by Google but we just use the relative performance to optimize our campaigns.

At the end of the day we deterime what revenue we got against which marketing cost and as long as this fits we're in good shape.

[cayenne]

Anyone know if AOL conversions show up on the Conversion Counter?

c

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Affirmative, cayenne. ;)

[eWhisper]

My guess (and this is pure opinion, not based on research) is that the percentage of Google users who do not accept cookies is quite low. IMO, probably in the single digits.

These are the averages for the sites that I track. The average percentage of those who don't accept cookies for non computer related website visitors is between 2-4% (median last month was 2.4). For computer related websites, they ran the gambit of 3-6%.

The site that ran a 6% no cookie acceptance rate, has a decent number of visitors viewing the site via non traditional means (pdas, webtv, etc).