You may have recently decided to jump into the wonderful world of web marketing. You figured you'd show how cool you are by doing your own search engine optimization or pay per click management. As a result, you just set up your first online ad campaign and now you’re ready to sit back and reap the benefits of its inevitable success.

I'm sure that your new ad may be well placed and eloquently worded and is probably doing well. At least that's what I'd love to hope for you. In fact, there is no way of knowing how effective your campaign is without the ability to track its progress. More specifically, if you don’t specifically track what people do after they click on your ad then you'll not know how well your campaign is really doing.

Conversion tracking is the process by which you can track the performance of your ad campaign. Oftentimes people think that a conversion is simply making a sale. In actuality, a conversion is any time you can get someone to do something you want. This can be as simple as clicking onto another page or add something to a shopping cart.

The most common tool for monitoring conversion goals is Google Analytics. Fortunately, this is a free tool. Through Google Analytics conversion tracking, you can track the page that someone comes to from an ad campaign and then track where they go. If the goal is to click on a specific link, you can track the percentage of people that actually perform that action.

When you are tracking your visitors as they flow through your website, you have the ability to know how effective your ad campaign really is. So, if you are trying your hand at your own web marketing, make sure you take the time to set up some conversion goals and track the performance of your campaigns.

If you don't, you might be failing and not even know it.