When a customer converts from an AdWords ad, but ends up revisiting the confirmation page to find information about their order, the one thing you don’t want is to have that action to count as a new conversion. Well, if that’s a fear, fear no longer, as order IDs can now be used to help insure a conversion isn’t counted more than once.
It was announced on Tuesday that advertisers are able to edit their conversion tags to capture an order ID, such as an order number or a confirmation number. Once this information is captured, when that customer revisits the conversion page from the same device they converted on, AdWords will filter out the duplicate.
There are some things that have to be done in order to get this going:
- Set up an AdWords conversion tracking tag. This kind of goes without saying, but you will need to set up a conversion action and have the conversion tag placed on your website to have anything to de-dupe in the first place.
- Capture some type of ID with your conversions. You’ll need to capture an order number or some kind of unique identifier when a user completes a transaction. Numbers, letters, dashes and spaces are all acceptable — up to 64 characters — as long as you’re not pulling in any info that could be used to identify a customer, like a last name.
- Be able to add code to the AdWords conversion tracking tag. The code is what inserts the order ID in the conversion tracking. If you’re not a developer, you’ll probably want to ask one to help you out at this stage.
The instructions for adding the code to the conversion tracking tag are available on this AdWords support page.