Understanding how conversion tracking works is essential to driving success in digital marketing. Conversion tracking allows advertisers to measure and monitor their ads’ impact on consumer behaviour. This data can be used to refine campaigns, optimize budgets, and analyze performance to maximize ROI.
Let’s start by taking a closer look at what conversion tracking is and why it’s important for digital marketers. Conversion tracking is an invaluable tool for monitoring user activity after clicking on an ad. It lets advertisers track the number of visitors who complete a desired action following exposure to their advertisement.
Okay okay… it’s not just about paid ads. Businesses and us marketers use conversion tracking for tracking conversions from all sources – including offline conversions… But I’ll touch on that later.
These actions could include making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or webinar, or downloading an app or white paper – any activity that serves as an indicator of successful engagement with the ad or webpage.
When designing campaigns with conversion tracking in mind, there are several key factors that must be taken into consideration in order to maximize their effectiveness:
// Example of tracking an Add To Cart event via the Facebook Pixel
fbq('track', 'AddToCart');Set Clear Goals
Before launching a campaign, it’s important to develop clear goals and objectives as well as identify meaningful metrics that can be used to measure success against those goals. This helps make sure your team is focused on what will bring maximum value from the campaign rather than getting lost in the details of execution.
Choose Suitable Tracking Platforms
With so many different tools available today, finding the ones that best suit your needs can be difficult. There are many different platforms out there that offer different features such as cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), click-through rate (CTR), impression share (IS), etc., so it’s important to do your research and choose one that fits well into your budget but also offers all the features you need for effective conversion tracking.
We ‘typically’ use a mix of Google Tag Manager and automation platforms like Zapier. For 99% of businesses, this is all you need. But, if you have the budget, you could implement extended phone tracking with a 3rd party tool like CallRail. CallRail allows you to track all phone calls to your business – or even specific marketing campaigns. And I’m not just talking about digital campaigns… If you’re printing out a flyer for a maildrop, you can have a dedicated number on this to measure the campaign’s efficacy.
Establish A Monitoring System
Once you’ve chosen the platform you would like to use for tracking conversions, it’s important to establish a system for monitoring results regularly so you can adjust your campaigns as needed if there appear to be any issues with performance or overall effectiveness.
Depending on the business, we use a mix of Google Analytics 4, Mixpanel, Shopify, Woocommerce, Facebook Ads and Google Ads. It really depends on how granular you want to go and what data you need to see. If it’s just a general overview – Google Analytics 4 will be your best friend.
Optimize Your Ads For Conversions
So you’re tracking all these glorious conversions pouring in! Now what? Now, you want to feed that information into Facebook Ads, Google Ads and TikTok. Why you ask? Because we want to feed them the information about your ‘ideal’ customers. The better data you can feed them, the better chance they have of finding a similar person in the market. And your results could go up.
Let’s use an example. We recently ran a campaign on FB and IG. The goal was to drive signups, but users needed to fill out a form that would take them 10 minutes! (don’t ask!). We nailed it early on with our targeting, messaging and landing pages, but Facebook was able to take our cost per signup from $1.50 to just $0.30. Something that may not have been possible without feeding it accurate data.
Analyze Results & Make Adjustments
Finally, once campaigns have been launched and running for some time, it’s critical for digital marketers to analyze results frequently and adjust settings accordingly if necessary in order to maximize ROI from each campaign over time – this includes both improving existing campaigns as well as creating new ones based off data from previous ones in order maintain consistent performance across all channels being utilized.
It’s also a great idea to regularly check the conversion data quality being fed back to platforms.
Ultimately, knowing how conversion tracking works is essential for any digital marketer looking to understand customer behaviour patterns and drive meaningful results from their campaigns. The five steps outlined above provide just a brief overview of what goes into creating effective strategies using these methods; however, putting these tips into practice can help ensure that your teams are fully equipped with everything they need to succeed when measuring conversions across all channels within their marketing mix.
