What is a Conversion and How Do You Track It? – Three Tips
Mar 29, 2019
Hello, everyone. Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude. Welcome to this month’s marketing message. This month we’re talking about conversions. What is a conversion and how do you actually track that? Now, the key with conversions … most often we’re tracking conversions as it relates to some form of paid advertising. This is typically with Google Ads or Facebook advertising. If you’re doing paid advertising to better effect, excuse me, better track the effectiveness of that advertising, you want to have conversions set up. So let’s talk about some conversions, and I’ve got three tips, surprise, again here this month for you on tracking conversions.
The first thing you wanna do is decide what it is you wanna track. Typically, there’s a couple different things that you can track. The real key is, and it gets into tip number two is, how do we measure some level of engagement? That’s really the key piece that matters. There’s different things that you can track depending on the system or platform that you’re tracking. One thing you can track is if someone clicked a particular link, even from an email, for instance. Did they click that link or go to a certain page on the website? So when they visited that page, we count that as a conversion. That is one form of a conversion.
To put this in a frame of, let’s say, marketing funnel, if they went to a landing page that said, “Hey, here’s my offer, put in your email address and hit the submit button.” They hit the submit button. The conversion would be tracked once they go to the next page. The next page is the thank you page after that. Once they’re on that thank you page, we’re now tracking that, who visited that thank you page and marking that as a conversion. We can track that back into our analytics, whether that be for the Facebook Ad campaign or the Google Ad campaign, or just regular Google Analytics as well. You can track that that is what you are calling a conversion. You’ve achieved a certain goal that you wanna track in a specific way, and there’s different ways that you can track that.
Another form of conversion that we use very often, especially with Google Ads is phone call tracking and counting a phone call also as a conversion. So if a phone call is made, we have software and tools that we use to track that and then we count that as a conversion. So again, that’s another level of engagement that’s very exactly measurable piece of engagement that we’re able to do. There’s different things you can do, in particular around Facebook, to measure conversion. If you’re doing some video marketing or video advertising, you could put a video out there that converts when people watch 50% of the video and things like that. So you can actually track conversions based on their actual engagement level with content, which is a pretty cool thing to be able to do on Facebook advertising.
The real key then is to track that over time, so how did we do last month, how are we doing this month, and then tracking that historically to see how well that’s working. Then, figuring out what do we need to adjust. So we track over time to then make adjustments. So if we see trends where the trend is going down, then we know, “All right, maybe we need to refresh our ad copy, or take a closer look and make sure that this is still the right message for the right market, and we’ve got everything set up the way it needs to be set up.”
That really is what conversion tracking is, is just a next level way to track your ad spend, by deciding what things do we wanna track and count as conversions, count as goals being achieved, and then take that data and use that to enhance the marketing further and then really tracking it over time so we can see how effective we’ve been and what tweaks and adjustments we need to make. So that’s your monthly marketing message here this month. Please like, comment, and share. If you wanna talk about conversion tracking for your business, we would love to talk to you about that. Let me know, we can schedule a free 15 minute call to check and see what you would like to track in conversions for your business.
Thank you and have a great month.
Read our latest blog post on Mastering the Marketing A’s: Understanding Your Audience for Better Results.
The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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