Ideally, a website should serve a business purpose. It’s not just there to look pretty and tick a box, it’s there to drive revenue. The question is: how? Different businesses will want different outcomes for their visitors. But generally speaking, you will want visitors to take some kind of action when visiting your site. The chosen action is a conversion.
But what exactly are website conversions? And how can you measure and track them?
Three types of conversions
There are many types of website conversions, but for most businesses, they will fall into three main categories:
Sales: If you are running an online store, sales are the aim – so each will be tracked as a website conversion
Enquiries: Most services will be aiming for enquiries, which can be a submitted form, someone clicking your email address, or phoning a tracked phone number.
Sign-ups: This can be signing up for a free trial of an app, or to your mailing list
A range of other conversions can also be defined. For example, a restaurant might view a website conversion as a visitor looking up the directions.
It is up to you to define what are the ideal outcomes for somebody visiting your site and to track these as conversions.
Why measure conversions?
Conversions happen whether or not you’re measuring them. The form will still be submitted, the sign up will still happen. So then the question is ‘why bother measuring them’?
Simply put, tracking conversions lets you identify which parts of your marketing are actually generating revenue rather than just visits.
On a large scale, this is reflected as channel attribution. It allows you to see whether customers are coming from organic search, paid ads, social or another channel.
On the small scale, the data can be used to refine your advertising campaigns. It allows you to see which keywords, adverts, display audiences or other aspects are giving you the best RoI so your campaigns can be fine tuned.
It’s about helping to guide your future marketing investments, to let you spend money and time on the areas that are working instead of just guessing.
How to track conversions
Most websites track conversions as goals in Google Analytics (GA).
Doing so requires installing a few snippets of code on the site, along with setting up the relevant settings within GA.
It is something we do as standard for Affordable Website Design clients, so please get in touch if you would like our assistance.
