Website Conversion Tracking

If you can’t track your website conversions, how do you know if your digital marketing initiatives are working? How do you know which digital marketing initiatives are working well – and worth increasing – and which are doing poorly?

In short, you don’t.

Marketing budgets in the United States are hovering at about 11.2 percent of a company’s revenue, according to Gartner. In order to continue to receive that allocation, marketing executives need to prove the returns are worth the spend.

Yet, one of the most often cited pain points of chief marketing officers and other marketers is problems with tracking conversions.

A conversion is a fancy way of saying “someone took an action.”

The ultimate conversion or action is usually the conversion of a prospect into a customer, through a purchase or signing up for a subscription service. However, there are many smaller conversions that a website visitor might take in order to get to that point.

For example, a conversion could be:

• Inputting an email address in return for a whitepaper download
• Signing up for an email newsletter
• Opening an email newsletter
• Clicking a link in that email
• Calling the number on your website to request more information
• Signing up to follow your company on Twitter or Facebook

Depending on a company’s goals and how they obtain customers, all of these online conversions may be important. So ensuring the digital conversion tracking is set up correctly is imperative.

This is where an experienced digital marketing company like 305 Spin comes in.

Online conversions can be tracked in many ways, sometimes in multiple ways. The essence of the tracking is that when a user takes an action on your website, in an email, on a Google Ad, that action is “recorded” as a data point. That data can then be manipulated to show how many conversions occurred in a specific time period, at what cost and more.

Some common ways of setting up conversion tracking include placing code, or a tag or pixel, on your website, which is then tracked via a particular software. Placing a UTM, or Urchin Tracking Module, at the end of a website URL is also used to track conversions.

After implementing the tracking device on your specific webpage or bulk email, software is used to monitor the conversions. This software might be Google Analytics or Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick Ads), or other enterprise software such as HubSpot or ClickMeter.

Analysis of conversion data can give many insights into your marketing efforts and what is working well and what could be improved.

For example, if you have a high clickthrough rate on your Pay-Per-Click ads but a low conversion rate, there could be a couple of things going on. Does the ad text match with your offer? Is your landing page optimized, or does it have a poor user experience. Nothing in digital marketing happens in a vacuum, and you need to analyze all the pieces in order to put the puzzle together.

This is something we at 305 Spin live for! (Seriously. We love the data.)

A small business came to 305 Spin for assistance with Search Engine Optimization and digital advertising. When we first audited the company’s Google Ads account, we couldn’t figure out why they needed help.

The account was showing almost a 100 percent conversion rate on many of the ads, and the cost per acquisition was the lowest we had seen.

But a little digging revealed that wasn’t an accurate picture. The conversion tracking had been set up incorrectly, so Google Ads was counting any clickthrough to the landing page as a conversion. This was making the results of the campaign skewed, Google was using incorrect data to optimize the campaigns, and the client was actually spending more money than necessary.

By correcting the conversion tracking, suddenly it appeared that the conversion rate when down – from about 100 percent to 2 percent. However, this actually made the campaign perform better.

After several weeks of being able to properly view the conversions and optimize the campaign using negative keywords, bid adjustments and more, the campaign was improved. More leads were obtained at a lower cost than had been previously.

If you are having trouble setting up your conversion tracking, ensuring the tracking is working correctly, or anything else with your Search Engine Marketing efforts, please let us know.

Proper conversion tracking and analysis of those conversions is one of 305 Spin’s specialties.  is contacted by companies every week who have found us in the SEMrush Agency Partner Directory. We are happy to provide you a free SEO audit and proposal.