29 Jun Why is Conversion Tracking the Most Important Element of SEO and PPC?
Whenever I start working with a new client the first action is usually always the same. To check and analyse the conversion tracking that is set up. You might be thinking that conversion tracking is only for PPC campaigns. Although it is hugely important to know what users do after clicking on an ad. Conversion tracking is important whatever channel is bringing them to your website.
You might think that conversion tracking is only for Ecommerce businesses. But every business has a goal and what a conversion means to them. This could be anything from a telephone call, a form fill or an e-mail. To a video play, or download of a PDF or App.
Many businesses may have been used to using Google Universal Analytics to track goals and conversions. With the death of Universal Analytics on the 30th of June now is the time to evaluate and make sure that your conversion tracking is set up going forwards.
Help Determine Which Campaigns are Working for You
So many times I hear from clients that they have tried a variety of advertising in the past. When asked how this went. They often don’t know. This isn’t their fault. But we, as digital professionals need to make sure that the number 1 element is set up and running before any work commences. This is conversion tracking.
Whether you are moving from Google Universal Analytics, trying something new like Matomo or sticking with Google’s new offering of GA4. You need to know what a conversion means to your business. Getting this set up as an event. (Yes, Goals in Universal Analytics and now Events in GA4.) Once you’ve worked out what a goal is for your business you can then set this up and class it as a conversion.
Whether it’s an SEO campaign, Facebook campaign or Google Advertising. You’ll be able to see which campaigns are driving the most conversions for your business.
Help to Make Fruitful Advertising Decisions
If you don’t know how well your advertising is working and whether the traffic that you are paying to send to your website is doing what you want it to do. you have no idea whether to do more or less of that method, Whereas being able to clearly see which source of traffic generates the most conversions can help you to push more of your marketing budget into the channel that is most profitable for you.
Using platforms like Google Analytics can help to give you an overall picture of your conversions from all sources. You can import these conversions from Analytics to other platforms. It’s good to see an overall picture of where other conversions are coming from and how there is a cross-over between campaigns. Just looking at your data in one platform can often give a narrow overview of performance. Whereas seeing the whole picture of conversions across all campaigns can help make solid advertising decisions.
Provide More Opportunities for Optimizing Your Campaigns
Once you have this conversion data you can then start to micro-optimise those advertising sources. Whether that’s pushing more money to certain keywords and removing dead keywords from Adwords. Or replicating your most successful social media post and pushing to new audiences or platforms. You can not optimise your performance if you have nothing to measure it against. This is why conversion tracking is one of the most important elements to get right before embarking on any SEO, PPC or social media campaign. It’s great sending a load of traffic to your website. But if you have no idea what that traffic is doing once on your website it’s impossible to make decisions on whether to keep spending that money.
Final Thoughts on Conversion Tracking
Remember, without conversion tracking, you’re literally trying a scattergun technique throwing effort at a wall and hoping that something will stick. Don’t leave your marketing to chance and make sure you are measuring what is important to your business.
