by Janet Attard

Are you ready to give up on pay per click ads? Are you getting a lot of clicks for your primary keywords but see few conversions registered in your AdWords account?

Before you turn off your ads or stop bidding on those primary keywords, consider this: You may be getting conversions that aren't showing up in your AdWords account.

If your phone number is easily found on your website and you have employees who take orders over the phone, there's a good chance some of the people who clicked on your ads called your office to place their orders instead of buying online. Those callers don't show up as conversions in your pay-per-click account statistics.

There may be considerable time lag between the time a surfer clicks on your ad and when they actually make a purchase, too. If a person is researching a planned purchase or needs to get approval from one or more additional people, they won't buy on that first click. If they like what they see when they reach your page, they'll bookmark the page, print out the page, or possibly send the url in a link to their boss, spouse, friend, or save it on their computer. Then days or weeks later, someone - maybe not the person who first clicked on that PPC link - returns to your site to make the purchase.

Then, too, there's the person who clicks on your ad during the day from their computer at work, then later the same evening, turns on their home computer, and goes to your site by typing its URL and buys what they saw in the afternoon. Because they're on a different computer, the sale won't register as a conversion in your PPC ad account.

So, if you are getting sales on a steady basis, remember that the conversion rate showing in your PPC account is only showing you some of the conversions. As much as 25% to 30% of your sales (or even more) may be sales that will never show up in pay-per-click campaign conversion rates.

More: Pay Per Click Pitfalls and Solutions

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