The beautiful thing about digital marketing is that you can observe the footprints made by your customer’s journey to your site, and the movements they make once they arrive. By sniffing out the tracks of your users, you can effectively measure the success of your AdWords and other digital marketing efforts to better understand the behaviour, reactions, and actions of your consumers. Conversion tracking provides valuable data on actual conversions resulting from an ad. Track where your successes are coming from and nurture them. Identify where you’re tossing money down the gurgler, and fix it.
Conversion tracking allows for a deeper insight into user behaviour after they click through your AdWords advertisements. You can analyse which aspects of your design and advertising are working, and which areas may need improvement.
It’s a little bit of code that can make a massive difference to your ROI. The best part, you don’t need to be a technical genius to set it up, and it doesn’t cost you anything to do so. When you started your marketing campaigns, you did so with goals in mind. All you need to do is enlighten Google on those goals and the bots will reward you with powerful consumer insight.
Types of AdWords conversion trackers.
AdWords offer five conversion types, each with options to customise how they’re tracking.
1.Webform Submissions: Webform submissions such as quote requests or mailing list sign-up, should be tracked as a conversion in your AdWords campaign by adding the conversion code to the ‘thank you’ page that users are directed to after they’ve completed your form.
2.Online Sales with Revenue: Revenue tracking for your shopping cart is a must for every eCommerce site. Calculate profit per ad, per placement or per keyword.[caption id="attachment_1919" align="aligncenter" width="1600"]
E-commerce. Shopping cart with cardboard boxes on laptop. 3d[/caption]
3.Calls from Website: Website call tracking is relatively new, and allows you to track how many phone calls are generated from your AdWords ads.
4.Calls from Ads: If you want to track calls made directly from the phone number listed in an ad, set up call extension to track phone calls using a Google forwarding number.
5.Offline Sales (Import): Track non-eCommerce sales generated from the Internet. Fiddly to set up; but well worth the effort.
Google Analytics conversion trackers
A typical Google Analytics goal is a defined action on your site. These may include visits to a particular page, time spent on pages, mailing list or form submissions, document downloads, quote requests, button clicks or phone calls. When you define a goal, every time a visitor executes that goal, Analytics will record it as a conversion.
Here’s how to set up a new goal on Analytics
1. Navigate to your website in your Analytics account and click Admin on the left. In the view column, click on Goals.
2.Click the +New Goal button on the top left. You’ll need to enter a goal name, and a goal type. Your choices are:
- Destination: This is if you want to record a screenview or pageview as a conversion.
- Duration: Nominate duration if you want to measure user engagement on your page.
- Pages/Screens per session: Record a conversion based on the number of pages your users view during their visit.
- Event: A specific action or interaction such as playing a video, downloading a document, submitting a form, or clicking a button.
3.Let’s say for example’s sake, we want to track users submitting our contact form. I would name my new goal something like “Form Submission”.
4.For my goal type, I would choose ‘Destination’. Then in the goal details under destination, I would select ‘equal to’, and enter the slug only of my thank you page URL. Eg. /thank-you/.
5.From here you can add a monetary value to your conversion. This is particularly valuable for eCommerce sites to track transaction revenue.
6.Activate ‘Funnel’ if this applies to your goal. You would do so if you need your users to visit multiple pages to execute a conversion. For example, you might set up a goal funnel for your eCommerce site to track each step to the payment page. This will give you a view of how many people abandon the process, and at which stage.
7.Finally, for an insight on how often this new goal would have converted based on your data in the last 7 days, click ‘verify this goal’.
8.Click save, and you’re done, you’ve set up a goal in Google Analytics. Setting up event goals for items such as button clicks, video views, or document downloads is a little more involved. First you’ll need to set up your events, and add tracking code to your site. When you set up an event, your tracking code is comprised of four elements:
- Category: The name you give to objects you want to track eg. “Buttons”.
- Action: The interaction type eg. “Click”.
- Label: summary of the event eg. “Click home page button”.
- Value: A numeric value assigned to your button click.Once your events are set up you can create your goals.
Useful tools for conversion tracking
If you’re not particularly technical, Google Tag Manager is a lifesaver. The tag management system allows you to update code snippets on your website, without directly editing site code. It’s quick, easy and minimises errors, while enabling you to update AdWords, Google Analytics and other non-Google tags directly within the Google Tag Manager interface.
Crazy Egg is a movement tracking tool and analytics platform that utilises heat map technology to demonstrate where your customers are spending most of their time on your website. Among other features, Crazy egg’s ‘Confetti’ feature gives you a view of where people are clicking on your site, and perhaps more importantly, where they’re not.
Insights are as critical a marketing tool as your website itself. The opportunity to identify how best to market your business through the digital footprints of your consumers is priceless. With so many powerful tools at your fingertips, there’s no need to sit back and wait for conversions, wondering whether your dollars are working. Tracking is the opportunity to define, refine and streamline the path to conversions. You have the power to use your digital marketing budget more wisely, and steer your consumers towards your goals.
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