AdWords Conversion Tracking with Thesis

You know it’s important to have an SEO-friendly content management system, and WordPress is my favorite CMS for most small business websites. Recently I’ve been using the Thesis theme for WordPress for most web design projects, and I’d be hard-pressed to launch a new site with anything else. In fact, this site is built on Thesis.

Thesis is well-optimized out-of-the-box and you can easily customize your blog design with just a few clicks of the mouse. It’s a no-brainer purchase if you’re looking to redesign or start a new website. That being said, there are times when you want to make some customizations outside the scope of the Thesis design interface. In these cases, you’ll need to use the custom_functions.php file. Sounds scary, I know, but it’s not so bad once you’ve used it a few times.

One function not provided out-of-the-box (yet) is easy integration of your PPC conversion code. But this can be easily fixed using a custom function.

Here’s an example. Let’s say I want to track how many people sign up for my free Small Business SEO lessons via AdWords. I would put the following code in my custom_functions.php file:

function insert_tracking_code() { ?>
<?php if (is_page('Thank You for Subscribing')) { ?>
<!-- Google Code for SEO-O Small Biz Lessons Conversion Page -->
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var google_conversion_id = xxxxxxxxxx;
var google_conversion_language = "en";
var google_conversion_format = "2";
var google_conversion_color = "ffffff";
var google_conversion_label = "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy";
var google_conversion_value = 0;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion.js">
</script>
<noscript>
<div style="display:inline;">
<img height="1" width="1" style="border-style:none;" alt="" src="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/conversion/xxxxxxxxxx/?label=yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy&amp;guid=ON&amp;script=0"/>
</div>
</noscript>
<?php } ?>
<?php }
add_action('thesis_hook_after_html', 'insert_tracking_code');

So let’s break this down into a generic code snippet you can use on your own website:

function insert_tracking_code() { ?>
<?php if (is_page('The Name of Your Conversion Page')) { ?>
<!-- Insert Google Code for Your Website Conversion Page Here -->
<?php } ?>
<?php }
add_action('thesis_hook_after_html', 'insert_tracking_code');

First, we defined what we wanted to do by making a function called insert_tracking_code. We said that if someone was on a page called [whatever you named your conversion page], then go ahead and execute the Google AdWords conversion code (you could also throw in Yahoo! and MSN conversion codes if you’d like).

Next, we used add_action to tell our server where to execute that function

1. The first part of the add_action directive is the where (thesis_hook_after_html is a Thesis-specific hook that tells the server to place the code just before the </body>)
2. The second part of add_action is the what – execute the insert_tracking_code function, which we just defined above

So there you have it. Now you can easily implement conversion code on your site without hacking the WordPress core.