Adwords doubled conversion reporting

Funny thing happened to me…

I had some campaigns running for a website to which I was tracking conversions.

For a few days I had the feeling that I had more conversions reported in my Adwords account, than in reality.

Today I noticed that I was contacted once but had 2 conversions so I looked back a few days and saw that the conversions were actually reported double.

I have not noticed this because I only had a couple of conversions per day and I assumed that maybe the visitors were doing some kind of refresh of the page.

Today I even found out why this was happening. I was inserting the conversion tracking code from a form template. On the conversion page I had the exact same form up on the page and at the bottom of the page. After succesful completion of the form, the tracking code was shown twice. This resulted in double reporting of the conversions.

If I think of it, this behaviour somehow seems logical, but then again isn’t. Google should be able to detect and/or report double inclusion of the code on a single page !

The PPC tool I always forget about

I’m no expert in PPC marketing or Google Adwords. I’m just starting out, I learned the ropes and now I’m trying to learn campaign optimization.

When building ad copy I always tend to forget that I can scout out the competition very easy with the Google Ad Preview Tool.

This tool is great because:

• You can’t click by mistake on your own ads thus losing money
• You can see ads from a specific geographic region (country,state,city) or even coordinates
• You can select the language you want to target
• You can select the Google domain to use (.com, .co.uk etc)
• You can see even the ads that do not appear on the first search page

I can’t think of any other at the moment. Do you ?

Also if you know any other usefull Adwords tool please share it to the rest of us.