Conversion Tracking: How your site could benefit from a data-driven approach
Are you looking to increase conversions for your online business? Conversion tracking can be a powerful tool in helping you reach your goals. But what exactly is conversion tracking and how do you use it to your advantage? This article explores the basics of conversion tracking and how you can use it to improve your online business.
What is Conversion Tracking? π²
Conversion tracking is a way to measure the success of your online business and marketing efforts. Conversion is among the most important aspects of running an online business or website, as it allows you to better understand how your visitors and customers behave as well as helping you track the success of your strategies with visitors. Knowing how many visitors are taking the desired action on your website is crucial for ensuring your business gets the maximum benefit from its web presence. To learn more about establishing web presence, check out our 5 step guide
Conversion is mistakenly seen as only making a purchase on the website. However, a conversion can take several forms such as:
- Email Subscription - Did a visitor subscribe to our email program? π§
- Purchase - Did a visitor make a purchase?
- Schedule Demo - Did a visitor schedule a demo? π°
- Discounts - Did a visitor use a discount?
- Downloads - Did a visitor download a resource? π₯
- Add Products - Did a visitor add a product to a basket?
- Video Views - Did a visitor view a video? πΉ
- Social Follow - Did a visitor visit our social or follow us?
- Donations - Did a visitor donate to a featured charity?
This is a general list across businesses, but this can be defined differently depending on the company or website in which it is formed. A blog will have different goals for defining a “conversion” vs. an e-commerce business selling water bottles.
Tracking conversions through services like Facebook’s pixel or Google’s tag allows you to track which sources are bringing in the most customers or leads, so you can focus on those areas for further optimization. Conversion tracking happens through:
- Calls to action - Are clients taking a desired action we are prompting?
- Customer journey steps - Are clients purchasing after performing a set of actions?
- Purchases or Subscriptions - Is my initiative successfully reaching the goal?
Investing in advertising or tweaking a website design may be the key to improving your online business performance. Tracking conversions is the first step in determining where adjustments likely need to be made for websites or campaigns.
βΉ “How Might Tracking Conversions Help My Business?”
Analyzing calls to action and other metrics such as page visits, session duration and bounce rate can give you clarity on how customers are interacting with your website.
Finding optimal calls to action and improving user-experience is essential for any successful online business as these can be the differentiators between good and GREAT businesses.
Measuring conversions helps in forming a figure around return on investment (ROI) of different campaigns, and ensures you’re getting a return on how your advertising dollars are being spent across platforms. Determining an ROI by different platforms allows you answer questions like:
- Which marketing channel is generating the greatest portion of my business?
- Which marketing channel is not meeting my minimum return requirements to continue purchasing the service?
- How are my marketing campaigns performing overall?
Instead of developing your marketing without a clear vision, focus on setting up a data-driven marketing strategy that you can measure whether or not it’s in your company’s best interest.
Benefits of Using Conversion Tracking for Your Online Business β
Conversion tracking allows businesses to measure and optimize their online campaigns more easily, resulting in increased revenue and more efficient marketing strategies. Following where a conversion happens can be one the most effective goal setting techniques available to e-commerce businesses today, allowing them to accurately track and measure the results of their campaigns. This data can be used to improve customer journeys, optimize ad campaigns, and ultimately drive up conversion rates.
By understanding how users are interacting with a website or app, businesses can make more informed decisions about which strategies are working and which need to be adjusted or eliminated.
A few of the benefits from tracking how visitors convert are:
- Improving advertising spend allocation
- Goal setting for your marketing initiatives on specific channels
- Collecting information about how your customers are interacting
- Monitor and track conversions in real-time to maximize results
- Utilize all available data sources to better understand your customerβs journey
- Leverage conversion tracking data to improve future decision making
- Contrasting and comparing marketing channel performance
Besides the benefits outlined above you can also understand audiences better to tailor messaging and content to the right people.
Conversion as a metric also gives businesses insights into which channels are most effective for generating leads and conversions, helping them better allocate their resources for maximum impact Furthermore, implementing a conversion tracking system is essential for any business looking to increase their online conversions. It provides valuable information that can be used to inform key business decisions and maximize the success of digital marketing campaigns. Conversion tracking gives businesses the insight they need to identify and target the right audiences, further increasing their chances of achieving desired conversions.
Strategies to Integrate Conversion Tracking π€
There are a few tools available that can help you determine if your business is converting as you expect. Here they are:
- Google Analytics - With Google Tag Manager, you can tag website elements to track calls to action and other important metrics that can help you identify which initiatives are working and which are not. π
- Mixpanel - An analytics tools that tracks events thoroughly so you can pass information to Email Service Providers (ESPs) for different campaigns for customers in their journey.
- Facebook Pixel - Determine which clients are finding your site and content from Meta Ads on Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp. π·
- Hotjar - Determine common paths visitors to your page use to find the information they need and where they are getting stuck (Bounce / Non-engagement)
Customer Journey π§
By understanding the customer journey, you can craft and adjust calls to action
that are specific to each user’s needs and interests. With data provided by the
tools noted above, you can determine what type of content resonates with your
target audience and apply this knowledge to improve digital marketing campaigns.
User intent is the most important aspect of search engine categorization.
A/B Testing π§ͺ
You can also use A/B testing to compare different versions of a page or UI element to determine which changes yield the best results. This could take the form of:
- Color adjustments - Does a certain theme or color scheme perform better with customers?
- Sizing - Do different sizes resonate better with clients? Bigger or smaller headings, images, or general fonts?
- Messaging - Are there words that perform better with clients?
Here are only a few items in A/B testing mentioned, but the variations can be almost endless until you find the optima.
A/B testing helps you see what is working and what needs to be adjusted in order to achieve the desired results from customers.
From calls-to-action to page layouts, A/B testing allows you to make informed decisions about what will help increase conversions for your business.
Desktop and Mobile Optimized π±
Making sure to optimize webpages for both desktop and mobile is also essential in order to capture more conversions. Unless your site is accessed 100% by mobile or by desktop (which is something that Google Analytics or Mixpanel can tell you), you likely have a variety of visitors from different devices and different browsers finding your page and purchasing. Adapting to the clients’ needs is evidently necessary so when they visit they are not deterred by the interface that wasn’t adjusted for their needs on mobile or desktop. In your browser, try inspecting and seeing the different devices on which your site would likely be loaded to see if the design remains as pleasant as it does on your common website development environment.
Measuring Marketing Channel Performance by Conversion
Now that you have conversion tracking like Google Tags or Facebook Pixel on your site, you can determine which channels work best for your business as customers convert. The trackers would tell you a bit of the following:
- Which was the last page a client was on before purchasing or converting
- How many steps were taken to purchase
- Whether or not bounces were seen from a given audience
- Whether or not visitors are interacting with an advertisement
Although they won’t give you specific reasons as to why an action was taken, these tools can narrow down areas in which a client takes an action so that experiments can infer the reason for a specific action.
For example
Hypothesis: Most of our business comes from clients who are following us on TikTok
Experiment: Tracking first page referrers and where they come from who convert.
Seeing where they come from my tell you that they are the highest converters, but they could just as likely be the highest converters and the highest bouncers as well.
If your page is mostly featured on a single platform like TikTok, this may skew your results into believing that TikTok is the only platform worth advertising on.
Final Say
In conclusion, Tracking conversion is a powerful practice for any online website owner, as it allows you to understand customer behaviour and accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Even if your website is a hobby page, you can determine how well you are performing with your audience. Connect with us today to learn more about how we can help you with setting up conversion tracking on your page