If you are an eCommerce site, you want them to fill up the shopping cart and check out. If your site is a lead generation front end for your sales force, you want the traffic (visitors) to fill out a web form so that you can contact them. This may seem obvious to you, and it should be.
How these activities are measured is where the good online advertisers separate themselves from the mediocre ones. There is no valid excuse for not tracking the financial benefit from your advertising spend on AdWords; you can use free Google tools to do this. It is surprising how few companies actually do this! If you can get the information for free, and it does not take much time to set up, why not see what you get in return from your advertising budget?
What you do with the information once you capture it is where the great ones separate themselves from the good ones. If you use it to bid for clicks based on what revenues you expect to get in return, you are driving your business among the top 1% of the online advertisers. You are truly using Google AdWords as a sales channel (vs. an advertising channel) and benefit from having predictable sales and sales costs. If you can have this, why would you not? It certainly beats counting conversions and having to guess what your revenues costs.
Finch has taken hundreds of clients to the point where Google is their commission only sales channel. If you have your cost of revenues locked in like this, assuming that you are profitable at that cost %, would you take as much revenues as you can? After all, you are only paying commissions for the sales you are getting. Surprisingly many clients get all the way to this point but then severely run out of budget. It is like having an ATM machine producing $500 per hour, but you can only afford to pay someone $50 an hour for 8 hours per day to collect the cash.
If you have done so much work with the site, products, pricing, merchandising, checkout process, landing page optimization, keyword selection, ad copy optimization, etc., etc., why not capture the sales you can get as long as they are profitable?
Because, you are not looking at Google AdWords as a commission only sales channel!