Conversion Tracking: Why It Matters and How To Get Started

Introduction

If you’re curious about conversion tracking and how to use it to your advantage, you’re not alone. This is your complete guide to conversion tracking so you can better understand how to use it to propel your business forward — and how Prismfly can help.

‍

What Is Conversion Tracking?

Conversion tracking is a process used in digital marketing to measure and analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, particularly in the context of online advertising. 

It involves tracking user actions, or "conversions," that result from specific marketing efforts, such as clicking on an ad, making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or completing a contact form.

By tracking these conversions, marketers can gain insights into the performance of their campaigns, identify which marketing channels and strategies are the most effective, and optimize their marketing efforts to maximize return on investment (ROI). This data can also help marketers allocate their budgets more efficiently, targeting the channels that generate the most valuable actions.

Conversion tracking can be done through various tools and platforms, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, and dedicated analytics software. These tools use tracking codes or pixels embedded in a website or app to collect and report conversion data, enabling marketers to monitor and adjust their campaigns accordingly.

Why Does Conversion Tracking Matter?

Conversion tracking is important because it helps you figure out if your website and marketing efforts are effectively guiding visitors toward your products or services. It shows how well your strategies turn visitors into customers, and helps you spot potential problems. 

Conversion tracking is a key part of conversion rate optimization (CRO), which aims to increase the number of visitors who complete desired actions.

‍

What Conversion Goals Can You Track?

Conversion tracking might seem complex, but tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Manager, and other dedicated analytics software can simplify the process. Knowing which specific conversion goals you can, and should, track is a key part of improving your site and optimizing your conversion rate. 

Let's explore some common conversion goals:

Website Visitors

Tracking website visitors shows how well your marketing and advertising efforts work. Analyzing overall and specific page visitors (i.e. looking at total visitors as well as identifying which pages they actually visit) helps you both identify areas for improvement and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns.

Purchases Made

Tracking purchases helps you understand your website's overall effectiveness as a revenue stream. This metric is important for determining website success and evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing initiatives. 

Purchase data can also reveal trends like popular products, seasonal changes, and the impact of promotions or discounts.

Newsletter Sign-Ups

Newsletter sign-ups indicate how well your website engages customers. Email marketing is a powerful tool for maintaining consumer interest, and tracking tags offer additional metrics. 

Monitoring open rates, click-through rates, and conversions from your email campaigns can help you improve your email marketing strategy and boost customer engagement.

Email marketing can be highly effective in creating and retaining consumer interest — not only does a newsletter sign-up prove a certain level of initial involvement with the users, but it also provides opportunities for creating new metrics. For example, putting tracking tags on your emails can help you see what kind of email marketing elicits the most responses.

Items Added to Cart

Monitoring items added to a cart and how that changes over time is useful for tracking conversions. 

The initial addition of an item shows product interest, giving insights into customer preferences and product presentation. 

Cart abandonment might indicate an ineffective call to action or issues with your website or marketing strategy, or may even be a sign that there’s something in the checkout process that’s driving customers away. 

If site visitors are adding items to their carts but later forgetting them, it can speak volumes about your overall website and marketing.

Contact Form Submissions

Tracking contact form submissions measures how well your website encourages visitors to connect with your business. This metric can help you find areas for improvement in your website's design or copy, and assess the quality of leads generated through your website. 

Monitoring response times and conversion rates from contact form leads can also provide insights into your sales process and customer service quality.

Social Media Shares and Engagement

Tracking social media shares and engagement shows the effectiveness of your website's content and its ability to encourage visitors to share it with their networks. 

Metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and retweets provide insights into the popularity and relevance of your content, helping you improve your content marketing strategy and increase brand visibility.

Event Registrations or Downloads

For businesses offering events, webinars, or downloadable resources, tracking event registrations or downloads is important. These metrics reflect the perceived value of your offerings and can help you identify trends, preferences, and areas for improvement.

‍

How Can You Start Tracking Conversions?

There are a few key steps you can take in order to begin tracking conversions. 

Identify Your Goals

First, decide what you want to track and why. The goals we mentioned above are just a starting point — the actual data you collect about how visitors interact with your website is what will determine your specific goals. 

For instance, if you're not making enough sales, you may want to examine shopping cart data and user abandonment rates. This analysis can help you identify issues like unexpected costs or a complicated purchase process.

Other goals might include increasing page views, boosting offline conversions for physical stores, or raising the average purchase amount on your site.

Create a Marketing or Sales Funnel

Next, develop a marketing or sales funnel to model the stages a person goes through to become a customer. 

The AIDA model (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) is a popular choice. Awareness represents the broadest group of people at the top of the funnel, while Action refers to the smaller group who become customers at the bottom. 

Align your funnel stages with elements of your website, so that when your tracking system detects an interaction, it is added to the funnel. A largely consistent funnel width from top to bottom indicates a healthy process. 

Remember, some level of engagement with casual visitors is necessary, so a perfectly cylindrical funnel may not be ideal.

Enable Your Tracking

Make sure you enable tracking, which may involve addressing privacy concerns and gaining visitor trust. This step is vital for your conversion rate journey.

If you have a Google Ads account, set up Google Ads conversion tracking to monitor your marketing and Google Ads campaign performance. You can also configure Google Analytics to track specific goals and collect relevant data.

Collect Your Data

After enabling tracking, collect and analyze the data. 

Look at the data as a collective picture of your website's overall success and track user progress over time.

For example, ensure there is a certain number of users at each funnel level and observe how they move through the funnel. Users may occasionally move backward in the funnel, which is important to recognize and address.

‍

The Bottom Line

Conversion tracking is crucial for improving the customer experience and, in turn, improving your conversions. There are many different conversion goals that you can track and work to improve, including site visitors, items added to cart, and content engagement. 

We hope the above steps help guide you to tracking conversions and optimizing your marketing strategies for success, but if it all still feels a little too complicated, we’re here to help. 

The experts here at Prismfly are committed to simplifying the conversion rate optimization process — by handling it for you.

Connect with us today to see what we can do to help grow your business online.