Best method to measure conversions (Adwords)

[Headwurdz]

Hi, I am a new member and fairly new to PPC. I have a service based site (car detailing) and I have been using Adwords for quite sometime now.

My primary question is about tracking conversions. I have dedicated landing pages for each one of my ad groups (and some kw specific landing pages). When a potential customer lands on one of my pages - lets say my "car wash" page, they have the option to:

1. Call from that page to book a service (I have a trackable number on that pages)

2. Book online (its a 3rd party booking app with no tracking functionality)

3. Continue to my main site for find out about our other services (I have a few outbound links set up on the page)

But, I am running into problems when it comes to conversion tracking. I am not doing any call tracking via Adwords, so what would be the most effective way for me to track conversions?

A) Should I set up event tracking in order to count outbound clicks as conversions?

B) Should I remove all outbound links from that landing page and use the custom phone number on that page? My fear with this option is that customers may want to see additional services that are on my primary site. Therefore, I don't want to limit them to that landing page only.

C) Should I use Adwords call tracking? If I go this route, I would have to decrease my campaign budgets in order to offset the call tracking costs.

Or maybe there is another option I should consider that someone with more experience could offer. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[Headwurdz]

Thanks for the feedback, this is the type of information I needed. I saw some sites recommend tracking the outbound clicks, but I didn't think that would give me any real actionable information.

[john4math]

If you're tracking by using different phone numbers, you could set a cookie on these landing pages with which phone number is the default to use, and then have the rest of your pages display that phone number instead of your regular phone number.  That way users will ever be exposed to one number, and you'll have tracking for those people who came to your site from a landing page.

All of this wouldn't be too difficult to implement.  You could do it with jQuery and a jQuery cookie plugin.

[DavidKonigsberg]

Got the issue - you can add a dynamic number changer to your main site but you would need to add a tag to all urls from site a to site b to make it work .

[Headwurdz]

I have unique numbers per adgroup, but being that I have outbound links on the landing pages that lead to my main site (which has a different phone number), I can't discern whether the calls initially came from organic, direct or ppc traffic.

I know that if I remove all outbound links from the landing pages, they will have to use the unique phone numbers, but that's something I don't really want to do.

I don't know of any definitive way to fix this issue, so, given this situation, i'm just wondering what would be the best way to track conversions. Should I just tag outbound links and assign a value to them and treat those as conversion metrics or is there another way.

[DavidKonigsberg]

What is your main issue with your current tracking? Do you have unique numbers per adgroup that you match to your adwords?