The goal of advertising is to influence a target audience to take a specific action. The point at which the recipient of a marketing message performs that desired action is known as a conversion.
Conversions can take many forms, including signing up for a newsletter, going to a particular link, filling out forms, purchasing a product, or even watching a video. In order to increase conversions from your marketing efforts, it is helpful to understand what brings more conversions to the business or website. And to do this, you need conversion tracking.
What is conversion tracking?
Conversion tracking allows marketers to understand what happens after a customer interacts with your ads and converts. By adding a conversion pixel to your site or mobile app, each conversion is recorded anytime that particular action is completed. This helps you to understand your conversion rate (what percentage of your impressions are actually converting), as well as cost per conversion (how much you are paying for each conversion).
In turn, these conversions offer a deeper understanding of how your campaigns are performing, helping to optimize future ad campaigns with the goal of increasing conversion rates.
Benefits of Conversion Tracking
- Improved Audience Insights: The data collected about your site visitors who have successfully converted offers additional insight into who your most valuable customers are. By understanding where they came from, what ads or offers performed best, or other characteristics that are shared among this group of converters, you can use this information to fine tune your targeting for future campaigns. This will hopefully lead to a further improved conversion rate for the next campaign, to help increase your return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Identify Best Performing Creative: Conversion tracking will help you understand more than just how many clicks and impressions your ads are generating. By identifying the highest and lowest performing keywords (for PPC campaigns) and ad creatives (for display and other channels), you can tweak or remove under-performing keywords and other elements of your ad. Once again, this removes extra ad waste by only focusing on the ads that lead to actual conversions rather than just clicks.
- Understand Your ROI: Understanding your audience and which messaging or imagery appeals best to them is great, but the best part about conversion tracking is understanding how much you are paying to get actual leads or customers. By calculating your return on investment, as in, how much are you paying per lead, you can identify when you might be overpaying for leads so you can make adjustments to your campaign. Without the help of ad conversion tracking, it is difficult to understand which of your campaigns worked best at the right price point. This knowledge helps you focus on the campaigns that bring you more conversions, without wasting time on under-performing elements.
- Optimize User Experience: Utilize conversion ad tracking to improve your website before you spend ad dollars on paid traffic to increase your target audience. If you are getting a significant amount of traffic to a particular landing page, but the actual conversions are low, there may be a UX problem with that page. Take a good look at the flow of the page and the effort required for a visitor to convert. If the load time is high or usability and mobile-friendliness are low, or if the page content doesn’t match the ad content, the bounce rate increases.
Why Should You Use Conversion Tracking?
Ad conversion tracking is a necessity for marketers who are looking to continue to optimize the user experience and increase leads or sales. Measuring conversions allows you to make smart and informed decisions for the growth of your business. It may take time to thoroughly understand which campaign or variation of ad works best for you, but in the long run, adding conversion tracking into your marketing plan offers additional visibility into your target audience and how to find more customers like them.
Not sure how to get started? Contact us to connect with one of our campaign strategists who can help answer your questions!