AdWords Hardly Tracks Mobile Conversions

January 31st, 2008 by Peter Glaeser | RSS feed for comments on this post | TrackBack URI

mocoNews reported that the Google AdWords Conversion Tracking doesn’t work properly for mobile ads. This is something that I had told Google over a year ago already. The Google AdWords Conversion Tracking is hardly suitable for the mobile internet. Why? Because it’s based on cookies.

These days roughly half of the browser handset in use do not support cookies. If you were Google, how would you know which keyword and ad triggered the conversion without cookies? Exactly, you simply wouldn’t know. Yes, as mobile phones get replaced regularly more phones will support cookies. But as pay-per-click is often a narrow-margin business Google’s conversion tracking becomes useless for mobile.

The Javascript in the Google conversion code might be another hurdle. But firing the pixel in the noscript image tag is enough to transmit the conversion to Google. It seems to me that the Javascript code is there only to display a Google ad and to collect more user data. That’s why they make the full code mandatory (see their terms & conditions).

But what’S the solution to the problem? Either Google offers their advertisers a batch-tracking service. Or the advertisers will have to use a third-party tracking service that records the click and conversion data and matches them through the AdWords API.