How Should I Track My Visitors Conversion Activities?
This is a very common question and there are several testing & measuring solutions which will give you the information that you need to have if you are going to be able to make proactive decisions going forwards.
If you only take one piece of advice away from this page of conversion information…. it should be this…….. “Track Everything You Can Because The Data You Can Harvest From Your Visitors Is Worth It’s Weight In Gold.”
The beauty of your website is that you can record everything that a potential customer looks at on your site. Where they enter, the keyword they used, how long they stayed on each page, the way they navigated from page to page, what they downloaded, what videos they looked at, and much more.
This information will provide you with an incite into how your visitors behave on your site. What they like, what they dislike and what makes them use your call to action and either contact you, download more information or buy something from you.
There is an argument that if you are trying to SEO your website you shouldn’t use Google analytics to collect traffic data as you are ‘providing Google with information they can use against you.”
That is sort of true, but they collect so much data without the need for you to be signed up to Google Analytics, that it is almost irrelevant.
If you choose to use an alternative to Google Analytics then thats fine, but….. google will still have access to many of the traffic signals it needs to rank your site via; Google Chrome (used by 40%+ of people), All Android devices as well as the user engagement metrics from search.
In many of the instances, if you are running a ‘clean’ website it is actually beneficial to use GA because you then provide a complete picture to Google rather than it relying on the pieces it can glean from its other sources.
In the current search climate of trust and authority being everything, Google also tend to be wary of sites that don’t sign up for it’s WMT’s which tend to go hand in hand with GA. If you don’t have either it can often send the wrong signal to Google.
Testing & Measuring With Google Analytics
Whether you use GA or another analytics software, the principles are the same. You want to track all your visitors from the source of their visit all the way through to a conversion.
A conversion can be many things; a sale of a physical product, a virtual product, a free download in exchange for their contact details, a phone call, a video view, an email contact request, etc.
Whatever it is that you want your visitors to do as the next step in your sales process.
Conversions
Conversions are the key to collecting useful data from your site.
If you use goals and events to track all the actions that a user can take, then you will build up performance data for how each of your traffic channels performs.
Once you have that data you can use it to test and measure improvements to your sales process so you convert more visitors into customers.