If you have ever tried to Advertise on Microsoft AdCenter and used Adcenter’s Conversion Tracking Code to measure the performance of your campaigns, you’ve probably noticed something fishy with the numbers that were coming back.  Most likely, you noticed that AdCenter, although much lower in search volume, seemed to convert at a much higher rate than Yahoo and Google.  A big win for your search marketing campaigns right?  Not So Fast.

Microsoft Adcenter’s implementation of Conversion Tracking is fundamentally different than both Google and Yahoo’s Implementation.  Adcenter’s Tracking Code is set to count a conversion every time a user sees your conversion tracking page.  In contrast, Google and Yahoo allocate only one conversion event per SEM click.  This means if a user refreshes your conversion tracking page, or even uses the browser to back up over the conversion tracking page, etc.  A conversion will be counted.  Depending on how your site is built (the effect is more pronounced when there is an interstitial conversion tracking page) Adcenter will record 1.5x to 3x the number of true converting events! 

This poses a challenge for PPC Marketers as we are often managing to a specific Cost per Conversion. Not knowing this, you might think you have your campaigns optimized to a $30 Cost per Conversion, but the true Cost per Conversion could be as high as $90!

The Fix

Unless you have coded your own conversion tracking mechanism or integrated a database to track all inbound traffic, or have the money to dish out for a fancy web analytics package, you will have to deal with using Microsoft’s Conversion Tracking.  At first glance, you might think that you could simply code your site to only display the conversion tracking code the first time they hit the page.  (Using Server Side Logic)  Upon further testing we found that this fix works for Firefox browsers but not for IE.  The key issue is that IE will execute JavaScript on a page even in a cached version!  This means when you back up over your conversion tracking page – even though it is a cached version the conversion tracking JavaScript will track yet another conversion.

Since JavaScript executes whether you refresh a page or not, any logic to fire the code will need be done client side.  How to do this?  LeadQual’s Implementation Involved Saving a cookie that says a browser has already visited the conversion page, and checking in Javascript to see if that cookie has ever been set.  If it has – then don’t execute the Microsoft Conversion Tracking Code Again.

Ultimately what this means is – you can use a template piece of Javascript Code that only needs to be configured with your account information and drop it in place of the standard Microsoft Conversion Tracking Code.

We Have Example Code Available – but not yet packaged for general release.  Interested?  Leave a Comment or Write Back!

Patrick Wang

Online Marketing Analyst