Tracking Online Conversions – The Why and the How

Conversion tracking is one of, if not the, most important aspects of digital marketing. It can be tricky though – especially for smaller businesses. Don’t worry, we’re going to cover how to track your user behavior and what type of conversions you should focus on.

When it comes to tracking, it’s critical to make sure you are capturing the right, and most accurate data:

Need help setting up your tacking? Check out our Analytics offering .

Getting clean and verified conversion data is crucial to successful online marketing. If you don’t know what’s working and what isn’t from a user perspective, you can’t truly understand performance and optimize to improve it.

There are a few different platforms where this information can be collected and there are many supplemental actions you can track besides the final purchase or form fill. Knowing which platform to use and what you should be tracking is important for any digital marketing management team.

Google Analytics is an essential tool for running any online advertising. Setting up your reporting views, events and goals, granting access, and connecting with Google Ads should be the first steps to managing your online presence. Tracking conversions through Google Analytics allows for measuring necessary valuable metrics such as sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, and more. This single source provides valuable data for PPC , SEO , CRO, and most other services you might be using.

Secondary conversion actions can be set up in Analytics and tracked back to Google Ads, such as users moving into the late stages of the buying funnel, accessing a certain webinar, or even clicking for directions to your business location. All these “micro conversions” can be measured and leveraged to understand user behavior and determine the success of a campaign that may not drive completed conversions.

For smaller businesses, simplifying processes is key, which is exactly what Google Tag Manager (GTM) does.

GTM allows you to easily organize your tags and triggers across multiple channels. Tag Manager makes it simple when it comes to setting up tracking for conversions, page views, clicks, web events, and other important actions your audience is taking. An important strategy to grow your audience is to track individual users who have visited your domain, import the aggregated audience back into Google Ads, and serve them customized ads based on the specific pages they browsed. By combining a tag configuration with a trigger inside your container (“container” is the Google Tag Manager term for your account interface), you can track specific goals users complete. For example, if your conversion action is having a user fill out a form to access a webinar, the Thank You page URL should have a static component which is the trigger to add as a tracking parameter.

Pro Tip: Use GTM’s preview mode to test tags are firing correctly before publishing changes.

Whatever your online conversion goals may be, having both accounts set up properly and used regularly not only allows for proper conversion tracking, but also allows you to gain additional insights into user behavior. Google Analytics data should guide the implementation of each optimization. Tag Manager is essential to verify each conversion action. Get accurate data and ensure you’re taking advantage of both these free platforms.

Contact us to learn more about Unfair Advantage’s digital marketing approach.