Whether you’re using Google Ads to drive traffic to a specific landing page or creating beautiful Facebook and Instagram Ads for brand awareness, you should begin each new marketing effort with a goal in mind. These goals could have been to boost leads, sales, or brand visibility. Regardless of what they are, it is imperative to track your progress so that you can fully understand what’s working and what’s not.
Defining a Conversion
The first step to creating effective conversion tracking is to define what a conversion is for each of your campaigns. In a lead-generation campaign, for example, a phone call or form fill could be a conversion. In a brand awareness campaign, it could be a view of a page that details a new product or service. A conversion can be defined as any action a user can take on your website that you identify as valuable, and therefore want to track.
It’s a great idea to use your conversion tracking in tandem with your Google Analytics Goals. This allows you to track your website’s success across all of the various channels that users are visiting your site from. This is especially useful if you are utilizing multiple marketing channels, as it lets you view everything from one dashboard, making your data a lot less overwhelming and a lot easier to digest.
The good news is that conversions, while they may seem overwhelming, can give you incredibly valuable data, which you can then use to make smart decisions that lead to success and increased ROI. Conversion tracking setup can be tricky, but luckily, there are abundant resources, both from ad platform documentation and from 3rd party users, that detail how this process can be implemented. Google Tag Manager also makes tracking conversions within Google Analytics & Google Ads much easier than it would be without.
The Value of a Conversion
A fundamental question you should ask yourself when defining your conversions is how much a particular conversion is worth. A good example is the value of a lead. If you can calculate how many leads turn into customers and how much a customer is worth to your company, you can calculate how much each lead is worth.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that for every 10 leads you get, you close three of them, and the average value of a customer is $1000. If this were the case, each lead would be worth $300 for your company. This can help you make your goals – if one lead is worth $300, and you have a sales goal of $10,000 that month, that would mean that you would need 34 leads in order to hit your goals. This can help you plan ahead, predict your revenue, and adjust your strategy sooner rather than later. The best part? This data only gets more accurate as you collect it over time and gain a larger sample size.
A well set up system that gathers useful data is the key to continuous improvement & growth in any marketing campaign.