Paid Search Assists vs Conversions

When making decisions on changes to keywords based on conversion rate, cost per acquisition or any other sales metric, you may be hurting important influencing keywords that don’t get the last click but drive sales nonetheless. AdWords helps attributing credit where credit is due so that you aren’t too quick to bid down a keyword because on the surface it looks like it hasn’t driven any sales.

The Search Funnels report in AdWords can show you how much you should worry about keywords that are assisting in sales but not converting. Export the Assisted Conversions report and then filter out all last click converting keywords so that you only see the keywords that have never had a conversion but have had an assist.

In this example there were 191 keywords with the last click conversion and 113 with assists but no conversions. 37% of the keywords might look bad from a last click conversion rate or CPA standpoint but were still vital to getting the sale. In this case any keyword that didn’t contribute a conversion or an assist should be bid down but all other keywords should be given their due credit and either bid up or kept around longer to see if they can drive even more.