When talking about effective tracking of your online, most people stop at analytics. Ensuring that your site traffic is tracked is absolutely vital as a first step. However it really is only the first step on a much longer journey. We generally default to Google Analytics.
In the above analytics report you can see what we would estimate, 75% of our clients see when it comes to the data. The first red line indicates that day the analytics hit the site, the second line indicated the day of a particular event for which this website is dedicated. No real surprise here, we can see that traffic peaked on the day of the event. But what else?
The next step would be to look at segmented data by traffic source. Here we can see a broad overview of where our traffic is coming from in terms of Organic Traffic, Referral Traffic, Search Traffic (same as organic in truth and this probably should have displayed paid ads, but for the maths whizzes among you, you can deduce that we had no paid ad traffic as we weren’t running any and I’d already done the copy paste job so…) and Direct to site traffic or those people who knew the site or had it on a favourite / bookmarked / been here before etc.
Advancing the scope of analytics, can give you real insights into where your traffic is coming from, where your site visitors travel on your website and how they behave. This knowledge is great to have – if you’re not tracking certain actions or events that are happening on site, you don’t know when that site trafficbecomes a real lead for your business. That’s where the difference between tracking and effective tracking really comes in. With some advanced analytics knowledge we can get set up with effective site tracking of your online conversions.
When somebody clicks on one of your conversion points, are you tracking it? When somebody visits your Contact Us Page on a mobile phone and clicks on your click to call link, are you tracking it? Your website has many points of conversion (see above for some examples of conversion on our own website) and multiple sources of traffic. Knowing where your converting traffic is coming from and where on your site the conversions are happening is an absolute necessity in today’s Internet Marketing world to ensure that you are able to make informed, educated decisions on what to do next with your website. From small changes in colour schemes, to A/B testing of pages or location of forms etc, to full-scale site overhauls; without knowledge of what is happening today, you’re going in blind tomorrow.
Knowing where your conversions are coming from, which pages convert and which types of traffic is invaluable to your business. Are converters those people who come direct? Are they organic search traffic? Are those paid ads worth the spend? If you’re unsure, your probably wasting money in one form or another. In the above screen shot, we’ve kept it relatively high level as we are looking at all conversions from 2 sources. Drilling down further will tell us which pages saw conversion and the type of conversion that occurred.
At imexpert we consider that we have three disciplines; Search Engine Optimisation, PPC Management and Conversion Rate Optimisation. In truth, neither of the first two, work without the latter. Without an idea of how and where your site converts in the first place, how can we (or anyone) hope to optimise your site, SEO or PPC campaign for conversions, in the second place.
This insight is provided as an absolute foundation in all imexpert campaigns and we would invite you to get in touch for a quick audit of how and where you are tracking your site data.
Want more information? imexpert is here to help if you have any questions on this or need to get set up with the basics of on site conversion tracking or any query at all, get in touch.