[AMA] “How Often Do You Monitor Your Conversions?”

Here’s a question I saw on Reddit today:

“How Often Do You Monitor Your Conversions?”

Below was my response.

I like to perform different checks at different intervals. The number of ‘conversion tracking checks’ on my list is quite large (>100). I’ll limit my response to the most important ones.

The intervals for repeating the checks vary between the accounts, with the intervals based on the size (monthly spend) of the account; bigger accounts have higher frequencies.

Here’s my typical conversion tracking monitoring for an account that spends between 10k and 50k per month.

QUARTERLY

1. Check if all important user behaviors and conversions are being tracked (i.e., purchase, begin checkout, add-to-cart, MQL, SQL, Prospect)
2. Are there any custom goals, or should there be? Are they used correctly by the campaigns?
3. Count setting: how many conversions are being counted (one or all) per click/interaction, and is this correct?
4. Are the click-through, engaged-view, and view-through conversion windows set to the right values that match the user journey and sales cycle?
5. Is consent mode (V2) implemented properly?
6. Are ‘enhanced conversions’ configured correctly? (Pro tip: use separate conversion actions with and without enhanced conversions to measure the uplift)
7. Is Google’s conversion modelling working?
8. Has the new_customer variable been configured so campaigns can be segmented based on new vs. returning customers?
9. Are website redirects dropping conversion tracking parameters (i.e., UTM, GCLID, gad_source)?
10. Does it make sense to implement Custom Variables in your tracking? If so, is it set up correctly?

MONTHLY

1. Are the most important conversion action(s) used for bid optimization and reporting (primary), and less important conversion action(s) for observation (secondary)?
2. Do the conversion actions’ repeat rates make sense? 
3. Are you submitting unique transactionId’s for each conversion? (check for duplicate conversions via filters clicks =1 , conversions >1)
4. No duplicate tracking (same conversion being tracked by two or more primary conversion actions)? 
5. Do the conversion goals have the right value assigned to them (fixed or variable, depending on goals)?

WEEKLY

1. Does the diagnostics tab show any issues?
2. In case of OCI, is the status of the uploads okay?
3. (*) Any significant increase/decrease in the number of last week’s conversions that deserves further attention (i.e., last week’s number of conversions deviates from the mean by more than 2 times the standard deviation)

DAILY

1. (*) Any significant increase/decrease in the number of yesterday’s conversions that deserves further attention (i.e., yesterday’s number of conversions deviates from the mean by more than 2 times the standard deviation) 

HOURLY 

1. (*) Is conversion tracking still up and running? Check for non-zero conversions in the last 

NB: I’ve automated the checks indicated with an asterisk (*) via scripts. I’ll share a free version tomorrow. Hit reply if interested.

– Nils

PS: I’ve decided to try and help some more PPC friends by answering questions via an ‘Ask Me Anything’ each Wednesday. If you’ve got a question to which my answer would benefit a larger part of the community, send it my way, and I’ll try to answer it 🙂