Search Engine Marketing Blog

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is a numerical method of determining how effective your web marketing is. Originally, the number of visitors arriving at your web site was used as the measure of success for the advertising. However, if none of these visitors purchase your product, your advertising is essentially wasted. The term for the purchasing the product is defined as conversion, stemming from the concept of ‘converting’ a casual visitor to a customer.

However, not all visitors are ready to purchase your product on the first visit. It’s important to keep the visitors coming back to the web site and to eventually purchase your product or service. In order to encourage the visitors to take at least one step toward the eventual purchase of your product, the concept of interim goal pages was introduced. Conversion tracking is a form of web site analysis that defines how well the source is delivering the desired action.

The source is defined as where the visitor arrives. This could be another web page, or a referrer, a directory, a search engine or other means. It can also be a characteristic of the visitor, such as age, nationality, or other defining feature. The goal can be measurable results such as completing an order form or signing up for an email newsletter. It can be important information for more than one of the web pages at a site to have page goals. This well help to determine which pages are most effective in attracting visitors and in getting them to take action.

The conversion tracking methods are determined either by log analysis from the web server for the page being studied or by tracking script included on the web page itself. Authorized personnel can access these reports in order to calculate the page conversion rate.

To determine the rate of conversion for a page, you simply divide the number of requests for the page goal by the number of visitors to the page and multiply by 100 in order to get the conversion rate expressed as a percentage. Obviously the higher the conversion rate, the better it is for your business.

Because of the realization of the importance of conversion tracking both Overture and Google Adwords have added free conversion tracking software that can be added to your web page. The few lines of JavaScript track such things as sales leads or contact information, which pages are visited and sometimes how often, if the viewer signs up to receive your newsletter or your Ezine, and of course, whether the viewer actually buys your product or service.

This tracking tool can help you determine where visitors are landing in your site, which internal links they are using once they arrive, if any, and whether the goals on one page are garnering higher results than on another page within your site. This will allow you to tailor your marketing to use only the most effective means.

It’s important to realize that even the best conversion tracking tools in the world only collect the information. What you do with the information once you’ve received it is what makes your conversion rate improve.

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