Are you tracking conversions?

[Mike Sack]

Hi - Welcome to the Conversion, ROI Improvement & tracking forum. Let's get our discussion kicked off by covering the basics.

Let us know if you are tracking conversions and if so, how you go about doing it. Please add one valuable thing you've done as a result of seeing conversions that might help others decide it is worth the time and trouble.

Look forward to your replies.

Mike Sack

[AussieWebmaster]

I track all PPC, banner and other marketing efforts... the first benefit is the true understanding of what is working and what is not. You may be using terms that you would think are profitable, but because of unknown uses of the terms a lot of money is spent without conversion.
Thus tracking can help you develop negative words to use...

[rustybrick]

AussieWebmaster covered the tracking of keywords and affiliates that provide a positive return on your investment. ROI is fairly simple to track with PPC, CPC, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. If your spending money on advertising and your not tracking then how do you optimize those campaigns? Bottom line, IMO, is if your doing any paid advertising then you must do tracking to some extent. Use in house tools, use 3rd party tools like Urchin or Web Trends or the well known PPC management tools.

Now what about tracking conversions for usability reasons? For example, you decide to change the color of your "call to action" button from blue to red. You need to see if the click through rate from page A to page B (page b is the call to action button's action) increases. You want to also see the bounce rate of page A decrease. Controlling or facilitating a users navigation throughout your site is key in increasing conversions rates.

With Urchin's campaign tracking module, I am easily able to set up "goals" on the Web site. Each time a goal is reached, it is considered a conversion. It is very easy to monitor conversions in the sense of dollars. But tracking conversions in terms of form completion rates, downloading pdf file rates and even going from page A to page B is also very important to monitor.

Using Web analytics tools allow for you to fine tune your Web site to increase any type of conversion or goal you might seek.

[AussieWebmaster]

AussieWebmaster covered the tracking of keywords and affiliates that provide a positive return on your investment. ROI is fairly simple to track with PPC, CPC, banner ads, email campaigns, etc. If your spending money on advertising and your not tracking then how do you optimize those campaigns? Bottom line, IMO, is if your doing any paid advertising then you must do tracking to some extent. Use in house tools, use 3rd party tools like Urchin or Web Trends or the well known PPC management tools.

Now what about tracking conversions for usability reasons? For example, you decide to change the color of your "call to action" button from blue to red. You need to see if the click through rate from page A to page B (page b is the call to action button's action) increases. You want to also see the bounce rate of page A decrease. Controlling or facilitating a users navigation throughout your site is key in increasing conversions rates.

With Urchin's campaign tracking module, I am easily able to set up "goals" on the Web site. Each time a goal is reached, it is considered a conversion. It is very easy to monitor conversions in the sense of dollars. But tracking conversions in terms of form completion rates, downloading pdf file rates and even going from page A to page B is also very important to monitor.

Using Web analytics tools allow for you to fine tune your Web site to increase any type of conversion or goal you might seek.

WebSideStory also has this feature... what it does is give you more feedback to be able to start imroving ROI through doing detailled analysis of page elements and working to improve the site to better convert a visitor. This is an aspect that is often overlooked in this area. Most people work on the other end constantly tweaking the creatives, the terms, the engines etc while forgetting that improving the site can make as much if not more impact on your sales... obviously parts of this have been used when setting up landing pages and the like... but advanced tracking can tell you so much more... what part of a form people leave from, what links or buttons are most used to go to the next page etc...

[AdamH]

I think that in the future all SE Marketing firms will have to show ROI on their campaigns. It's the only way to justify yourself to the guys up top. Anytime a business experiences a slight downturn, marketing budgets always seem to be the first slashed and expenditures on eMarketing are often seen as luxuries unless you can prove their value through hard numbers.

[Removed signature per guidelines]

[AussieWebmaster]

I think that in the future all SE Marketing firms will have to show ROI on their campaigns. It's the only way to justify yourself to the guys up top. Anytime a business experiences a slight downturn, marketing budgets always seem to be the first slashed and expenditures on eMarketing are often seen as luxuries unless you can prove their value through hard numbers.

Sad but true and when you drop advertising your numbers dip even further...

[Rob]

I don't see much talk here about tracking organic referrals. Is there a reason why? I know paid are generally easier to track, but organic is just as important and not that much harder to do.

With many of our clients we provide them with a side by side ROI comparison between organic and paid and can show them the real value of each. In most cases the organic is lower cost and higher converting.

[cline]

On one account where we installed conversion tracking we discovered that a high-volume, high CTR, obviously well-targeted keyphrase that everyone would have assumed was profitable was in fact a big money loser.

On the same account we assumed that it would not be profitable to advertise one of the site's free offers, despite substantive searches for the specific free offer. We figured that if they were specifically asking for it for free, they wouldn't pay for anything else. Since that proposition could be tested with conversion tracking, we tested it. It was very profitable!

[AussieWebmaster]

On one account where we installed conversion tracking we discovered that a high-volume, high CTR, obviously well-targeted keyphrase that everyone would have assumed was profitable was in fact a big money loser.

On the same account we assumed that it would not be profitable to advertise one of the site's free offers, despite substantive searches for the specific free offer. We figured that if they were specifically asking for it for free, they wouldn't pay for anything else. Since that proposition could be tested with conversion tracking, we tested it. It was very profitable!

Yep it pays off... and at times is amazing what you can discover.