A Helpful Guide to Conversion Tracking

Here’s something important to know:

Forty-two percent of Google Ads account managers have no idea whether their ad campaigns are working or not.

With this knowledge in mind, it’s not surprising then to learn that most Google Ad campaigns that don’t take advantage of conversion tracking rarely turn a profit, which means that those same 42 percent of account managers have very little chance of success.

Conversion tracking isn’t exclusive to Google Ads, but it is a great barometer of the importance of knowing which campaigns are successful and which need some fine-tuning.

With this knowledge in mind, here’s some staggering information about conversion tracking:

• The median conversion rate for Google Ads that are well tracked is 3.16 percent, but most are much lower.
• Only around 15 percent of accounts have a conversion rate between 0 and 1 percent.
• The top 25 percent of well-tracked accounts have a conversion rate of nearly 8 percent.
• Ten percent of well-tracked accounts have a conversion rate of over 20 percent.

The key here? Tracking your conversions matters. What do you need to know about conversions, both online and offline? Let’s take a look:

Why We Track Conversions

If you’re investing in a new ad or marketing campaign, you want to know how successful it is, right?  Conversion tracking can help you measure the return on investment of your campaign and the impact that it has on your business.

When we track conversions, we are following actions that you’ve pinpointed as being valuable to your organization. What might this look like?

• Submitting leads or contact information
• Downloading content from your website
• Making purchases
• Registering for an event
• Downloading your app

The more information you have about your campaigns and how well they are working, the better you can plan, adjust and improve your marketing strategies. Did your investment pay off? Are you spending your marketing dollars wisely? How much did you pay for each conversion? Conversion tracking will help you answer these questions and more.

Google Ad Conversion Tracking

What can you do with conversion tracking in Google Ads? Here’s a small start:

• Discover which keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns drive conversions.
• Learn more about your ROI and make better informed decisions for ad spending.
• Use smart bidding strategies to automatically optimize your campaign.
• Learn how many customers are engaging with your ads on particular devices, browsers and more.

The Ins and Outs of Online Conversion Tracking

How does conversion tracking work online?

Conversion tracking starts with a conversion action. You set a conversion action that’s specific to one particular activity—one that helps your business.

When leads take this action, it registers as part of your campaign, logging the action. It could be a website action, a purchase, an email sign-up or any other action that a customer completes on your website.

What are some things you can do to track online conversions and interactions with your website? Start by tracking:

• Google Ads conversions using a customer relationship management tool.
• Direct visitors, or those who type your site name into the address bar.
• Search visitors who find your page using a search engine.
• Referral visitors, who find your website through another site like social media, a partner website or somewhere else.
• How first-time visitors interact with your site to discover what they are most interested in.
• Your bounce rate and exit pages, those pages that are causing visitors to leave your site.

You can even use this information to track and log conversions from offline marketing campaigns too—as long as you direct them to an online source in some way.  We call these offline-to-online conversions.

Offline Conversions

Marketing doesn’t just take place online—it should happen offline too. Marketing can’t take place in an online isolation chamber. Many marketing firms are fully aware of the success that offline marketing can have.

In fact, 47 percent of companies are focusing on offline marketing efforts to drive online traffic and conversions. To know how successful these efforts are, you need to track conversions.

What are some ways that you can implement conversion tracking for offline marketing?

• Create and promote a custom landing page dedicated to a particular marketing campaign. This will allow you to determine the success of the campaign.
• Create a custom URL, and promote it within your offline marketing campaign.
• Promote custom discount coupons for your offline campaign, and track the usage of the coupon code.

If you’re looking for more advanced offline conversion tracking strategies, you can try a few of these:

• Customer Tagging: Identifying customers in loyalty or frequent buyer programs and using this information to log onto your website, tying offline sales and online behavior together
• Unique phone numbers for specific campaigns: Use a unique phone number that’s dedicated to an offline or online campaign.

For example, with online campaigns, Javascript can be used for online campaigns on landing pages to identify the source of your referral. It can also be used to tag your customer with a cookie, and have the same, unique phone number consistently displayed so they always view the same phone number.

As a result, this gives you a way to track when your online or offline campaign is driving calls to your organization.

At Demand Machine, we know that it can seem like a lot to manage and track all these incoming conversions. Where do you even begin? Our team has the expertise to navigate you through the entire process.

We will help you with CRM development and implementation to analysis of content marketing and digital strategy consulting. After that, we’ll help you come up with successful strategies. Furthermore, we’ll  analyze and adjust them so you end up with unbeatable marketing that drives conversions like never before.

How do we do it? Our approach starts with an in-depth look at your status quo and conducting a detailed market research study. From there, we will execute and deploy a plan using conversion tracking and other invaluable tools to optimize it all.

You don’t have to manage conversion tracking on your own. We’ll walk you through the logistics, create compelling campaigns and evaluate the results to come up with winning strategies.

Ready to see what we can do for you? Check out some of our case studies, or get started by contacting us today.