Best Practices for Accurate Conversion Tracking For Maximum Efficiency
Campaigning and advertising aim to influence people to do something or use a specific product. Fortunately, technology has made advertising more widely accessible, which allows it to reach a larger audience quickly.
One of the effective ways to advertise is using Google Ads, which is an efficient way to market and campaign your business and attract customers. Unless you have installed a conversion tracker, your potential clients and visitations to your site may be hard to monitor, especially those resulting in sales.
Without conversion tracking, you don’t have a way to see how successful or how poorly your business is doing. So, what is conversion tracking?
What is Conversion Tracking?
Conversions are actions your potential customers take after seeing your ad that may be meaningful.
However, conversion tracking monitors a specified data point toward a business goal. It is also used to show a business’s marketing and advertising effectiveness.
Types of Conversions Actions
When setting up conversion tracking, you must choose from a conversion action, and every type has a different setup on your Google Ads account.
Here are five types of conversion actions.
1. Website Actions
These are the most common conversion types. Purchases, sign-ups, form filling, or downloading an offer such as a newspaper or eBook are some of the actions you can track. Google Ads provides a detailed process on how you can set up a website action to track conversions on your website.
2. Phone Calls
This is a standard action since it makes tracking easy and helps you to filter out the relevant calls and other essential data.
When tracking conversions from phone calls, there are 3 types you can encounter.
- Call from a telephone number on your website: These are calls made after a potential client clicks on your ad and is brought to a page with a phone number on it. That makes it easier to know the specific ad the call is coming from.
- Call from Ads: These calls are directed from a “calls-only” website. The number should be specific to ensure you know the calls are coming from your website.
- Clicks on a mobile number on site: These calls are tracked when a client clicks on the linked number on the site and calls you directly from their mobile phone. In this case, Google Ads tracks the calls only if they are received from that specific number on the website.
3. Online Sales
To ensure accurate conversion tracking, use online sales transactions to track your data on your Google Ads website. It helps you analyze and calculate your profit in every keyword and every ad.
For each conversion action, you’ll have to choose between having the same conversion value regardless of any transaction values your client might send. You’ll also need to edit transaction values from your tag and choose a default currency that will be used for any technical issues from your tag.
4. App Installs and In-App Actions
This happens when a client downloads your app or purchases an item from your app (in-app action). The data is only tracked for businesses that use apps for advertising.
5. Imported or Offline Conversions
How do you track conversions when an ad click leads to a purchase or conversation offline, through phone, or over email? Google Ads ensures that these conversions have been tracked as offline conversion tracking.
You can import the offline conversion actions through Customer Relationship Management which helps you to track your sales actions. When using Google Ads as your conversion tracker, you can use one, two, or even all five types of conversions; there are no limitations.
Conversion Categories
Apart from conversion actions, you’re also supposed to choose a conversion category for easier separation of data. Google Ads has more than 12 conversion categories, but Google puts them into three main types.
- Sale Categories: Purchasing an item, adding an item to the cart, or subscribing to a service are examples of sales categories.
- Leads Categories: Submit a lead form, book an appointment, sign-up, request a quote, get directions, or any other local or website actions are lead.
- Further Categories: They allow you to select unique conversion tracking situations for your Google Ads, such as page views.
Why Do You Need To Use Conversion Tracking?
Let’s look at some of the benefits of accurate conversion tracking and how it can help you understand the performance of your ads for ultimate business success.
1. Improves Your Marketing and Promotion Efforts
If you never check whether you’ve hit your targets, your business may as well be going downhill. Prioritize checking your conversion rates to make sure you keep improving them.
2. Track Your Return on Investment (ROI)
You may not know how much each customer costs your business before becoming a sale, especially if you are not using conversion tracking. Accurate conversion tracking helps you to make the right decision for your business to avoid wasting money and shows you where to invest your money better.
3. Allocate Your Budget Better
Tracking conversions can help you save money and get you more clients. Tracking ensures your profits are maximized. It also helps to ensure that money is allocated to your website’s highest-performing strategies.
4. Create Better Content in the Future
With conversion tracking analysis, there are long-term benefits. You can see your performance over the years, giving you a base to work with in the future. Conversion tracking will also show you what increased or decreased your rates over the seasons.
5. Identify Important Content
You will notice that your business is at its best when using conversion tracking. When the website starts getting a low Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategy, you can revisit the compelling content and use it again. Tracking conversions ensure you repurpose your content.
How Conversion Tracking Works
First, you must set up a conversion tracker by choosing a conversion action in your Google Ads account. This helps track actions on your website and phone calls, which allows your clients to reach you.
Here, I’ll look into how conversion tracking works for offline and other conversions.
Offline Conversions
When a user clicks on your advertisement after you’ve added a Google Tag or other piece of code to your website or mobile platform, a temporary cookie is placed on their device. It’s then registered as a conversion after the system recognizes the cookie through the snippet code you added to your website.
Other Types of Conversions
If no manual tags exist on your mobile applications or website, you’ll have to use a Google forwarding number for phone conversations on call-only ads. When this number has been used, you can track the caller’s area code and the call duration.
You can also follow the calls using app downloads from the Google Play Store. The recorded conversion data is then evaluated accordingly in the Analytics Tool, helping you understand how to achieve your goals through advertising.
How To Make Conversion Tracking Effective
Now that we’ve understood conversion tracking and how it works. Let us discuss ways to make accurate conversion tracking.
Setting Up Goals for Your Business
This should be the first thing you must do as a business owner. Goals show if your business is doing good or performing poorly. You’ll need more visits to your website for you to have high conversion rates.
Remember that using Google Ads search campaigns is the best way to generate leads and increase website visits.
Improve Website User Experience
According to research, conversion rating is the most functional analytic for your website performance. Therefore, use conversion tracking for your website to advance your potential clients’ experience.
Implement Enhanced Conversions
Google Ads can improve your conversion data accuracy by collecting first-party data conversions, and it has a good privacy policy, which is worth looking at. Enhanced conversions provide more vital conversion tracking, which improves your existing conversion hacks.
Use Ad Extensions
Ad extensions contain hyperlinked details like a call button and product prices. They have extra information that is shown alongside your ad. This increases more clicks on your ad, improving your Return on Investment (ROI).
Use Specific Keywords for a Better Conversion Rate
Various keywords are known to have a higher conversion rate than others. Use more specific words since most people have researched and know precisely what they want to purchase. For example, “Acme 710” shows a more specific product type than just using “Acme,” a general term.
Link Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads
Linking Google Analytics to Google Ads helps you analyze all your website’s activities after a customer clicks on your ad. It shows how many sales come from Google Ads, which enables you to improve your conversion rates.
Use Google’s Global Site Tag for Conversions
Transfer conversions from Google Analytics are accessible but have their limitations. Google’s Global Site Tag (gtag.js) is the best way to track conversions on your website for accurate data. Use Google Tag Manager to add conversion tags to your website for better flexibility.
How To Analyze Conversion Data
Marketing campaigns can have various conversion rates, which are easy to calculate. For the number of conversions in the clicking link rates, you’ll use the number of links clicked divided by the number of people who sent the link.
For call-to-action rates, you’ll divide the number of clicks by the number of people who opened the email. To calculate cart purchases and additions rates, divide the number of people who added items to their carts by the number of people who view your product on your website.
The rate of conversions for purchases made is calculated by dividing the number of purchases made by the number of visits to the products on the website. Conversion-based retargeting is when a customer adds products to the cart and then abandons; you can email the customer to help you achieve conversions from cart addition.
Conclusion
With all we’ve learned now, we understand how crucial conversion is for your business. It’s precisely what you need to turn all your website activities into earnings.
For the PPC strategy to be effective, you need to track and analyze your data to understand and improve your earnings. Accurate conversion tracking will help increase your rates and help raise your ROI. It will also help you to make intelligent decisions for business growth.
The most used tools for tracking conversions are Google Ads and Google Analytics, which, when connected, form a solid tool to increase your conversion rates. Remember to prioritize your goals, make your website user-friendly, and plan your next steps.