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Conversion tracking is a great way to show you how your business’ marketing is progressing, even if the progress isn’t directly through sales or new leads. If you’re Google Analytics qualified and comfortable with conversion tracking this is something you can set up yourself with advice from your internal tech team or SEO agency.
What does Conversion Tracking do?
Conversion tracking shows you:
– what campaigns are working towards generating new leads/sales
– what people are looking at on your website.
– progress that goes beyond sales (Browsing, viewing contact pages)
How does Conversion Tracking work?
Through tracking codes on your website you can see the journey a visitor to your website partakes on.
As the diagram illustrates there are certain steps that lead to a conversion (a new lead or sale) these steps are ‘events’ which lead from your campaigns or organic searches.
The prospect will start at a certain traffic source, whether this is from your PPC campaign or an organic search campaign, and arrive at your website. Once on your website, a visitor will then flow through your user journey and hopefully complete desired Call to Actions (CTA’s) which will lead to a final conversion.
B2B Businesses:
Actions are the steps taken that result in a new lead. For example, once the visitor has reached the contact page, the visitor has completed a call to action (by clicking on the contact us button that you may have setup as an event to track) and if then filling in a form or calling a phone number will have converted to a new lead. Likely events before this conversion would be browsing the about page and any blogs/ testimonials on your website.
The diagram shows a direct conversion that has led to a sale or new lead. There are different conversions that can take place depending on the nature of your B2B business. If a prospect visits your website and subscribes to your newsletter, for example, this could be something to track as a micro conversion, which will allow you to market to the prospect through an email strategy with the hope that the prospect will later convert into a lead.
Ecommerce/Retail:
Typical events that lead to a sale for an ecommerce business are browsing products, selecting products, entering information, purchasing products. Following this path, the prospect has now converted into a customer and most likely ended up on a thank you page. By tracking the ‘Thank you for your purchase’ page it’s easy to tell how many prospects have made this conversion, and which marketing channel they have arrived through (PPC, SEO etc) so that you can report on performance per channel.
