I haven’t been spending too much time on PPC recently at work with my company opening up new retail stores in Buffalo and all, but I had this question saved from a while ago. It still confuses me so I wanted to put it out there and see if I could get some insight from from some people in the know.

So here’s my question:

If a person clicks our Adwords ad, makes a purchase, then comes back and makes another purchase a day later, does Google record only the first conversion in Analytics as attributable to the first click or does it attribute both conversions to the first click?

Or for instance say someone clicked our ad, and then bookmarked our page, or clicked our ad and then came back later by directly typing in our URL but in both cases only made the purchase on the latter visit, does Google record the conversion as a direct referral or as an Adwords related conversion?

I do have confidence that Analytics doesn’t miss conversions, but for the majority of Google Adwords users, I think they’re busy with other complicated things like trying to write ad copy, or trying to get past the initial overwhelming shock of the power of Google’s ad network or crying in their sleep at night wondering why Google’s content network is like dark magic with seemingly unlimited potential, the technique with which to harness it’s power shrouded in secrecy… er., .. so I think most people are busy with other things than trying to worry about such a specific reporting question but it is really important when you aren’t getting 100 conversions a day for $10, you’re getting 5 or 10 conversions a day for $100. At that point, knowing exactly how people got to your site is very important.

An interesting feature which I think Google should (and could) implement (and is currently being used by Yahoo!) is “assists”. Basically, an assist is: every ad a person has clicked prior to the last ad clicked before making a conversion. This feature is good in a general sense and is actually a value added feature for Yahoo! which makes me actually need to look at Yahoo!s reporting because it uncovers which level of the funnel your keywords generally fall into. The more assists, the broader the search term (in theory) and the further away from the funnel goal they are.

If we all pray to the Google gods, maybe they will eventually develop a feature which will show something like traffic patterns of users from first visit to conversion with every twist and turn along the way including at the end if they converted during a session which they directly clicked an ad from or if they came back later (directly or via bookmark) for the conversion.

My final point is that I’m willing to bet there are a significant number of “direct referral” conversions which are padded by an ad click within the last day or two. That’s all I’m saying. Is this even a metric that other people think is valuable to track? If anyone has any professional thoughts or guesses, please comment, I’d love to know.

In the meantime, here are a couple related & recommended reads for you:

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