If you want to make sense of what’s selling and what’s not, who is buying, and who’s just bouncing off your site, then it’s time to learn how to use conversion tracking to help you. Conversion tracking might be the most important thing that helps you track your buyers, their behavior, and how they interact with your website.

This is a technical realm so it’s always better to take some expert help here. But what’s the fun in building something without breaking it a couple of times?

This article explains the importance of conversion tracking, the things you must do, and the mistakes you should always avoid when setting up conversion tracking especially if your user journey involves more than a single domain. So without wasting any more time, let’s jump right in!

 

What Is Conversion Tracking?

 

In plain words, conversion tracking is a system that you build and install to track custom metrics showing you user activity and behavior. It’s not typically analytics but a system built mostly insides your analytics platform or sometimes even outside of it to track how your users become buyers and what’s their typical journey.

 

The Importance of Conversion Tracking

 

Conversion tracking serves as the backbone of any successful marketing strategy. By analyzing user behavior and tracking specific actions, you get the right information based on data to deploy the right strategy. In a nutshell, conversion tracking helps you

 

Identify Effective Marketing Channels: Conversion tracking reveals the channels that bring the most buyers, allowing businesses to allocate resources effectively and focus on the most productive marketing activities.

 

Understand User Demographic Information: By tracking conversions, businesses gain insights into the demographic information of their buyers, such as age, location, and gender. This data helps in tailoring marketing campaigns to specific target audiences.

 

Analyze User Behavior: Conversion tracking provides valuable data on user behavior on websites, allowing businesses to understand how visitors interact with their platforms. This information can be used to improve user experience and increase conversions.

 

Ignoring conversion tracking can hold back businesses from finding the best marketing channel or a cohesive marketing mix. In simpler terms, if you don’t know your target audience, their typical traits, and the main channel that attracts the majority of buyers, you won’t be aware of where to put your resources and efforts for marketing.

 

Implementing Conversion Tracking Successfully

 

To make the most out of conversion tracking, you must follow a systematic approach. This section outlines key steps for implementing conversion tracking effectively:

 

Choose the Right Tracking System: Google Analytics is the gold standard. Period. It’s free and with a whole suite of different products Google offers, you can create a huge analytics and tracking system by using it. You can set it up yourself or take some expert help. However, remember that setting it right is important. On the other hand, if you want something very minimal, and you have no issue paying a little money each month, you can also explore a minimal tracking system like Fathom Analytics. It’s simple but does the job in a very minimal way.

 

Select the right KPIs: Don’t shy away from creating very detailed and custom metrics to understand what’s really going on. If you’re a SaaS and have a few pricing plans, it’d be wise to create custom metrics to track the conversion of each pricing plan separately.

 

Facebook & LinkedIn Pixel: Conversion tracking is all about cohesion. At the end of the day, we want to know the complete user journey of a user and the right attribution. If a user visited you through Google search for the first time and then visited your website through a Facebook or LinkedIn ad, it’s important to have that information added to your attribution model.

 

Leveraging Conversion Tracking for Optimization

 

Tracking conversions is important to allocate funds effectively and optimize marketing. It’s not just about investing more in channels that generate conversions, but also using data-driven changes and minimal effort to make a big impact. Now, let’s concentrate on the important areas where conversion tracking helps with optimization.

 

A/B Testing: A/B testing involves creating multiple variations of ads, landing pages, or other marketing elements to identify the most effective version. By testing different elements, businesses can optimize design, copy, and call-to-action elements to increase conversions.

 

Landing Page Optimization: Optimizing landing pages is crucial for improving conversion rates. Clear value propositions, compelling headlines, persuasive copy, intuitive navigation, and prominent calls-to-action contribute to a positive user experience and increased conversions.

 

Retargeting: Retargeting campaigns allow businesses to re-engage users who have previously shown interest but did not convert. By displaying targeted ads across various platforms, businesses can increase the likelihood of conversion.

 

Conversion Funnel Optimization: Analyzing the conversion funnel helps identify stages where users drop off or abandon the conversion process. By addressing these bottlenecks, businesses can improve the user experience and increase conversion rates.

 

A Common Mistake in Conversion Tracking Setups that Nobody Tells You!

 

A common mistake that most of the companies especially SaaS companies I’ve found are doing when setting up their analytics is to create two different analytic properties under one account. One for the marketing site and another one for the web apps. This way, all the data about users that are visiting your marketing site gets mixed up in the referral traffic received on your web app.

 

What’s happening is that users visiting your marketing site lose the cookie assigned to their browsers and the moment they jump off to your web app and get a new cookie there. If you’re running this setup, you should dive into cross-domain or cross-sub-domain tracking to get the right information.

 

Benefits of Cross-Domain and Sub-Domain Tracking

 

If you’ve set up cross-domain tracking right, your marketing site and web app keep a single record of the user each time he or she enters your website, from the channel used, and the activity gets recorded properly in the user behavior flow charts.

 

Your attribution starts making sense and you don’t get multiple records of a single user with behavior and journey that makes no sense. Everything is articulated, and combined, and makes sense for you to work on a true data-driven strategy.

 

Final Thoughts

 

Conversion tracking is a game changer tool for, sometimes either adjusting and even fueling their marketing efforts and propelling them towards results. By realizing its importance, and setting it up correctly (with cross-domain or cross-sub-domain tracking if you’re a new SaaS), startups can gain invaluable insights about their audience to make data-driven decisions.

 

With it, you can optimize your marketing channels, allocate resources where they are actually needed most, and thrive in the market. So, gear up, embrace conversion tracking, and start making the right decisions!

 

Key Resources

 

Here are a couple of channels on YouTube that can help you understand implementation of conversion tracking systems very easily.

 

1. Analytics Mania
2. Loves Data

 

Are you a startup founder, particularly in the SaaS industry, looking to implement conversion tracking and need guidance?

Click here to book a meeting for a free consultancy call and take a step towards optimizing and perfecting your marketing strategy.