Do you know if your online content is performing well? Are you keeping a tab on the ROI from your marketing campaigns? In other words, are you effectively evaluating the success of your marketing efforts? Driving conversions is the primary aim of a marketing campaign, and particularly crucial in the digital marketing realm. Without tracking conversions, it is hard to evaluate the outcomes of your marketing efforts. Measuring conversions is the only way to determine whether your marketing strategy is delivering the desired results- and to do this, you should adopt a strategic and systematic approach.
Tracking Conversions with Website Metrics
Before starting to track conversions, you need to understand what conversions are and why they need to be tracked. Conversions represent actions that visitors take when they’re interacting with your website. These conversions are recorded based on a predefined set of criteria that you assign to denote a valuable action by the customer on your website. There are a variety of conversions that can be tracked and measured. They can range anywhere between signing up for newsletters to making purchases on your website.
What Types of Conversion Data Can Be Tracked with Website Metrics
Using a variety of digital marketing tools, you can track several types of conversion data, including:
- Purchases
- Sign ups
- Website/App scrolling activity
- Downloads
- Event Registrations
- Video Plays
Why is Conversion Data Invaluable?
Conversions are significant because they indicate that a casual, passive website visitor has turned into an engaged and interested potential customer. This enables you to target campaigns more precisely to generate better results. You can also use conversion data to evaluate the impact of specific campaigns. For instance, conversion data can tell you which ads lead to the greatest number of customer actions, and which are the ones bringing maximum ROI. Similarly, it allows you to determine the trending search terms that lead to your ad, keywords, and campaigns that are performing well, and provides details of the converting visitors.
Website Metrics That Help Track Conversions
To track conversions and assess the success of your digital marketing campaigns, and to maximize your ROI, here are the essential metrics that you should keep an eye on:
- Sources of Traffic. You should be aware of where your visitors are coming from and which source brings the maximum traffic to your website. Are you getting visitors from email links, social media, or other sites? Are they coming from search engines, or online ads, or by typing in your URL into the browser? Knowing the sources of maximum traffic allows you to target your marketing efforts better.
- Average Time on Site. Users spend maximum time on websites that provide valuable, engaging content. Understanding the average time that a user spends on the different pages of your website can reveal a great deal about the user’s intent and stage of conversion. It also gives you a picture of the types of content that engage them better, enabling you to revise or strategize your content to improve retention and boost ROI.
- Rate of Conversion. Calculating the conversion rate allows you to determine the number of visitors who took one of the actions necessary to meet your marketing goal. This may include video plays, sign ups, downloads and the like.
Conversation Rate = (Total Conversions/ Total Visitors) x 100.
The average conversion rate is one of the indicators of the performance of your marketing campaign.
- Performance of Content on Social Media. Social media pages can drive traffic to your site like no other. Whether visitors read your blog post, watch your video, or engage with any other type of content, social engagement can be a key indicator of conversion and therefore they can be a very insightful source of conversion data.
- Returning Visitors. When visitors return to your website for more, they contribute to a valuable conversion insight. Direct traffic coming from entering your website URL in the browser is the metric you need to track to identify returning visitors. The rate of returning visitors in comparison with the time they spend on your site performing various actions can be a very useful metric to identify audience trends and to maximize the opportunity this offers for targeted marketing.
Rate of returning visitors = (Returning visitors / Unique Visitors) x 100
- Email Subscriptions. By tracking email subscribers based on sources, you can identify where the maximum subscribers come from. This data can be used to design engaging subscription forms to capture their details and use them for personalized and automated email marketing.
- Click-Through Rate. The performance of your ad copies, and blog content online are key performance indicators of your website that have to be tracked. Monitoring the click-through rate for these indicators using headlines, title tags etc. can help you determine whether your efforts are bringing in the desired ROI. An average CTR of 2.5% is desirable for email campaigns, whereas for digital ads it can range between 0.5% to 4%.
CTR = (Total Clicks / Total Impressions) x 100
Using these website metrics, you can not only track conversions in a systematic manner, but also analyze and draw useful insights from them to make informed, data-driven decisions about your marketing strategies, while optimizing your efforts towards maximizing ROI.