Importing Analytic goals into Adwords

[Vacatia_SEO]

My company is in the process of updating how we track conversions in Adwords and Analytics. One prgrammer suggested importing Analytic goals into the Adwords account. I am extremely hesitant to do that because I know that Analytics and Adwords don't always play nicely together.

Does anyone have any experience (positive or negative) around this. Pros and cons? Should I keep the tracking separate?

Also, FYI, our flow does not employ the traditional "thank you page" conversion model. We have java scripts and onload events that fire when goals are triggered. I am not a programmer so I am a little out of the loop on how it all works. All I know is that I want conversions/goals to be attributed to the correct channel.

Help me mozzers!

[john4math]

You can track conversions through both platforms, and still upload conversions from Google Analytics (GA) to Adwords if you want to.  It makes sense to track conversions through both, because I'm sure you have conversions coming from other marketing campaigns and from organic sources that you can't track through Adwords.  Adwords conversion tracking will only track conversions where the user clicked through from an Adwords ad, so you won't get a complete picture.

Unless you view conversions in GA showing all touches, you'll see some differences in conversion tracking between the two platforms, due to differences in attribution.  For example, if someone clicks on an Adwords ad, and then later that day clicks an organic listing to your site and converts, then in Adwords that'll count as a conversion for Adwords, and in GA that'll count as a conversion for the organic listing.

[Vacatia_SEO]

Thanks Josh for your response. We decided to implement Adwords conversion tracking and not rely on Analytics goal tracking. I was not confident in Analytics ability to track Adwords conversions so I kept it all separated. If anyone has experience with differing statistics between the two, I'd love to hear it.

[john4math]

This is completely benign.  It gives you the option to add a few more columns in the Adwords interface, like:

• Bounce rate
• Pages/visit
• Average visit duration
• % new visits

I haven't really looked at the conversion statistics that get brought in, but I don't think Adwords will act on any of them (for example if you use conversion optimizer).  It's solely to provide you with data that's in Google Analytics within the Adwords interface.