If you have an e-commerce website where you are advertising or selling a product or service, then it is important to be able to accurately track conversions. This is especially true if you are running Google Adwords PPC ads for the product. In order to calculate the Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) you need to know whether your ads are generating leads, prospects and sales.
However, conversion tracking - as it is called - in Google Analytics isn't always a straightforward process. The process can be even more challenging if you have a website with a lot of dynamically generated content. Tracking events, goals and conversions for these sites can be difficult because often the webpages produce multiple content or pages without the benefit of a unique URL attached to those pages. As a result, in its default mode, Google Analytics will not know that this dynamically generated content was viewed by a visitor.
So, I published this blog post to help you understand some basics of conversion tracking.
*Definitions
But first, a few definitions.
What is a conversion? Well, a conversion can be defined as any observable event or activity that a visitor to your site can take. Perhaps the easiest conversion to understand is when a visitor purchases something on your website. Other types of conversions include
*Completing a Contact form
*Calling a phone number
*Downloading a document
There are others, but these are perhaps the most common. In short, a conversion is any activity a visitor takes, while on your website, that brings her a step closer to making a purchase.
*Attributing Conversions to PPC Ads
For obvious reasons, you may wish to know whether a PPC ad helped to produce a particular conversion event. For instance, if a person purchases a product from your website, it is helpful to know whether the person came to your site from a PPC ad. This way, you have some measure to go by when calculating how effective the ad was; it helps you know whether the ad is "doing its job" so to speak.
Of course, you can use the old "ask them how they got to your product page" approach, but you may find that this is not effective. Often times visitors don't remember how exactly they reached your website. Or, sometimes they will just give you a general answer like "I found your site on Google", which really won't help you much. Therefore, it is good to know how to track visitors using Google Analytics, especially when they make a purchase.
*Tracking Ad Conversions
There are ways to track virtually any web activity, but for our purposes we will stick to tracking purchases.
How do you tell whether an ad generated a purchase? Another way to put it: How do you know if a purchaser originally came to your site from an ad?
Though it sounds simple, tracking this accurately isn't always simple. The path a visitor takes from initial entry to your website, to making a purchase, is rarely a straight one. A visitor may click an ad, hit the landing page, surf around for a while to gather additional information, and the reenter the purchase process. Or, a visitor may leave your site altogether, and revisit the next day to make the purchase.
These common web surfing scenarios make things hard on Google Analytics. In its default settings, Analytics can't accurately track conversions in these scenarios. So, you have to activate certain additional features within Analytics to really see what's going on.
*One Method
A lot could be said about this subject - far more than can be covered in a single blog post. But here is the basic outline.
The first step is to tag all the URLs of your ads. Google has a URL builder to assist you with this. Basically what manual tagging does is to create a unique URL for each ad's landing page. Though the landing pages will still be on your website, the original URLs are rewritten, so to speak, to be unique and exclusive for each ad.
Manual tagging also signals Analytics to count the visit source as a PPC ad, as opposed to an organic, referral or direct visit.
Once you have tagged each ad, the next step is to set up your conversion funnel. A funnel has an endpoint and a begnning point. The endpoint is the purchase confirmation page. This is the page the visitor is directed to after making a successful purchase.
It is essential to have a confirmation page to accurately set up the conversion funnel.
The beginning point of the funnel will be, as you might have guessed, the tagged (or rewritten) URL. You can create a separate funnel for each ad and tagged URL.
*What Manual Tagging Accomplishes
Now, when a visitor clicks an ad with a tagged or rewritten URL, Google Analytics will count that visitor as coming from an ad. If the visitor makes a purchase, the he will wind up at the designated confirmation page. As we specified in advance that this confirmation page is the endpoint of the conversion route, or funnel, Analytics will count that purchase as a conversion attributed to the ad. Analytics gives you a nice neat little report that clearly shows you how many purchases (conversions) each ad produced in a given time frame.
There are many more advanced tracking features you can apply. For example, you can assign a dollar value to each conversion destination. In his way, Analytics will add up how much revenue the ads generate to make ROI easier to calculate Nevertheless, this is the basic procedure for accurately tracking conversions.
Best regards,
Eric Bryant, Director
Gnosis Arts
22 Ray Court
Bedminster NJ 07921
908.787.3475
www.gnosisarts.com
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