Google Is Sunsetting Converted Clicks – How to Adjust (and Look Ahead)
Published: August 29, 2016
Author: Trevor Morrissey
Google recently revealed that they will be making converted clicks something of the past and pushing users to begin migrating to conversions columns in September of 2016. Utilizing the conversions columns over converted clicks supports more complex performance measurement – such as cross-device conversions and store visits. In this post, we’ll dive into what that means for marketers – and what it might mean for the industry
How to Adjust Your Accounts
As SearchEngineLand explains, you will want to migrate your conversions settings for the account according to what metric your bidding options are going to refer to for guidance. These options include: Conversion Optimizer, Target CPA, and Enhanced CPC. Another large action item is to navigate to Conversions and ensure that your settings for counting conversions are accurate: 
If you’re solely wanting to count individual submissions and not all that resulted from any given click, you’ll want to make sure the setting above is correct. For many advertisers, converted clicks was previously used to measure/optimize in this fashion. This adjustment is critical, as multiple aspects of your program could be affected. To start, you could be potentially be over-counting your conversions. As well, if you’re utilizing any bidding strategies or have enhanced CPC enabled within your account, these automated techniques will be setting bids based upon your conversions. If you are accidentally counting every conversion that occurs, these bids will likely be set higher than desired as you are feeding the algorithms used to set those bids with data that may not benefit your business. Make sure to make these adjustments as Google gets rid of converted clicks to ensure your account is fine-tuned to run as efficiently as possible.
What It Means for the Industry
While Google long ago introduced cross-device conversions to enable more sophisticated reporting, the function was sparsely utilized. I believe this move this is another piece of the puzzle that Google is putting in place as they work toward being a one-stop shop for paid search advertising. Through pushing users to take advantage of more complex reporting and analysis such as cross device conversions, Google is looking to advance the perception that you don’t necessarily need a bid management platform such as Kenshoo or Marin. Look for those platforms to come out with responses in advanced features/reporting tools over the next few months.
