Dear Tech Support: Conflicting conversion figures on different dashboards are driving me up the wall

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Dear Tech Support,

Why is my AdWords dashboard showing a different conversion number than my Google Analytics account? Help!

Cross-eyed Marketer

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Dear Cross-eyed Marketer,

The problem probably lies in the fact that AdWords shows the total amount of ‘conversions’, whereas Analytics may be showing a specific kind.

For example, if your brand’s online sales funnel is five steps, Analytics will show the clicks for each step. A conversion happens at each of those steps, so you’re able to track the drop-off between them.

AdWords, however, will compile them all into one total number. So it might look like you had 66,000 conversions in AdWords, while Analytics shows 5,400 conversions at Step 5.

A successful sales conversion would actually be all five conversions tracked, as that means the user made their way through the entire sales funnel. 

The solution? Dive in and set up your AdWords dashboard to separate each type of conversion. This will involve coding and tags, so enlist someone technical to help.

Good luck!

Tech Support

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What should I look for in reports on native programmatic?

Brand safety: CPCs campaigns are often used by long tail ad networks to buy cheap, low-quality clicks in non-brand-safe sites to boost the vendor’s margin. Plista focuses on premium partners and media outlets only — make sure that’s the case for your campaign.

Post-click KPIs: the click itself is just the beginning of the user’s journey. Therefore, the click price alone should not be considered as the only KPI that decides for a campaign’s success. High user engagement, longer time spend on page and a positive brand attribution should be factored in and demanded for instead. 

Put viewability and CTR in the right context: viewability is a major topic these days — for a reason. Especially in expensive branding campaigns, success is hard to measure. Plista native recommendations, however, are CPCs based, and direct response optimised. Therefore, all risk is taken away from the client.

Serina Tsou, head of plista, Asia-Pacific