I’ve been stuck in a loop with Adwords (and customer service) that is driving me nuts.

I have relied on a single conversion type (landing page=invoice only visible to completed purchases) for about two years.

My client began using a mass mailing vendor who couldn’t tell us how to track their performance in GA because the “traffic was too high.” (We won’t be using them anymore). I tried several ways to detect their traffic, including setting up a GA referral=xxx goal, which I imported into AdWords as a second conversion type. My plan was to track these new conversions alongside our historical conversion data, similar to the sign-up action John mentioned above.

So, two conversion types: one for purchases, one for visitors from a specific referrer.

Suddenly our conversion rate was exploding! Naturally I checked to see if these conversions were purchases (as a result of so many new email referrals) or were simply landing page conversions.

Guess what? AdWords was now reporting “conversions” that were a combination of both conversion types!

To complicate matters, when our conversion rate went up, Google sent me a notice that we were now eligible for “focus on conversion” bidding (I’m assuming that means CPA, but that’s not the term they used.) I figured I was getting something special, for top performing accounts.

So now I can’t separate the two types of “conversions” in my reporting data, and the month of July will always look like we sold products like crazy (and our bid calculations and performance statistics are now wrong!)

So… was it MY mistake to assume that I could segment my reports by conversion type?? Have you ever encountered this confusion before?

Thanks for reading.

I’d like to have the ability to filter or segment based on the type of conversion.

I have one conversion type set as the actual purchase receipt, and another conversion type set as the people who reach the newuser account created page via the basket funnel.

Since the visitor comes in thru an ad, puts an item in the basket, creates a new user account to view the basket, I consider this to be an adwords funnel conversion. Even tho the funnel was abandoned because they didn’t buy, they did create an account and I will have the ability to send a discount offer email to entice them to come back and actually purchase what is in the cart.

Similar funnel for wish list.

As it is now, I have to turn these conversion types off because it messes up the metrics.

Since it is pointless to view these conversion types in aggregate, the ability to filter or segment these conversion types is the feature that will allow me to actually turn these conversions back on.

At least I have my funnel data in GA, but still, it seems like a trivial addition.

Thanks for the blog. I landed here trying to see if there was a way to do this.