What Is Conversion Tracking?

Short Definition: Using software to record the actions of customers when they complete a conversion.

Conversion tracking helps you find out which online marketing efforts have driven valuable customer activities, aka conversions. A sale is a common example of a conversion, but anything that moves a visitor closer to making a purchase could be considered a conversion. For example, a lead generation business may want to track form fills from their website and click-to-call interactions from mobile devices.  

To accurately evaluate conversions, you’ll need to place a piece of code on the web page or ad you want to track. Fortunately, you won’t have to do this manually if you enable Goals in Google Analytics. You can learn more about Google Analytics’ Conversion Goals here.

Google Analytics also lets you set up Conversion Funnels. These funnels help you visualize the path a site visitor took before converting. For example, you might discover that many shoppers are landing on a product comparison page, clicking a link to a specific product page, and then making a purchase. Based on this discovery, you might decide to expand your product comparison page and optimize it for certain keywords so that it ranks higher in the search engine results pages and draws in more customers.

Why Is Conversion Tracking Important?

Without conversion tracking, you wouldn’t be able to determine which online marketing efforts were leading people to spend money on your products or services. Conversion tracking helps you:

• Calculate the return on investment (ROI) for different marketing strategies
• Discover which pieces of content, keywords, ads, and campaigns are most successful
• Calculate the average cost of acquiring a new customer
• Identify drop-off points (i.e. pages where visitors leave your site without completing a conversion)
• Determine where to allocate your marketing budget