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Not every action that you want visitors to perform on your website (conversions) can be tracked by AdWords’ default conversion tracking. For example, if you don’t have a Contact Us form with a Thank You page on your website, but have an email link that  prompts the user’s email client to open when clicked, tracking how many people click on the email link can effectively measure that type of action.

Unfortunately, it cannot be done by AdWords’ conversion tracking. The same thing goes for tracking the direct download of a white paper, demo software (assuming visitors are not required to fill up an information form), etc. In a previous article, we shared another method to track clicks as Adwords conversions using a Javascript code that opens an invisible iframe containing the AdWords (or any other tracking code) at clicks on the tagged links.

Today we’re describing how you can achieve the same goal by setting up Event Tracking as Goals in Google Analytics, and importing the goals into AdWords as conversion. Here are the steps:

1. Add Google Analytics’ onClick event to the link that you wish to track:

<a href=”HYPERLINK URL” onClick=”_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'CATEGORIES', 'ACTIONS']);”>CLICK ME</a>

*Note: Replace all caps fields with the appropriate value.

HYPERLINK URL: the actual URL of the hyperlink.

CATEGORIES: Can be anything. Email Click or Download would be good choices from the above examples.

ACTIONS: Can be anything, but since we are tracking clicks as goals, let’s call it Clicks.

CLICK ME: The anchor text of your choice.

2. Log into your Google Analytics account.

3. Click on the profile setting icon on the top right hand corner.

4. Click on the Goals tab.

5. Click on + Goal from any of the available goal sets (if you don’t have any goals set up yet, just use Set 1).

6. Fill out the form as shown below:

7. Set a Name for your goal. It can be anything, as long as it makes sense to you.

8. In Category, fill in the blank with the exact string you used for the CATEGORIES variable in the tagging parameter.

9. In Action, fill in the blank with the exact string you used for the ACTION variable in the tagging parameter.

10. Click on the Save button to save your goal settings.

11. Log into your AdWords account.

12. Click on the Tools and Analysis tab and choose Conversions from the pull down menu.

13. Click on the Import from Google Analytics tab.

14. Select the goals that you would like to import, and you are done!!

If the Import from Google Analytics tab is grayed out, that means there are no goals currently available to be imported – probably because no one has clicked on the hyperlink you wish to track yet.

Pitstop Media offers ROI-based internet marketing services. If you need help with PPC management or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies reduce their paid advertising cost by as much as 48% and increase AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410%. See our internet marketing case studies.