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What Can Conversion Tracking In Search Help You Measure?

Conversion tracking is essential to the success of your online business. This is because you want to know how a customer behaves after they've engaged with your content!

Following movements in search is an indispensable part of monitoring conversion metrics. It will show you:

  • The volume of successful transactions
  • User numbers who clicked through on your ads
  • How many visitors converted into paying customers
  • Whether your sales funnels have converted customers into ambassadors

Before you get here, though, you need to run through each of your conversion optimization steps to ensure every piece of the conversion puzzle is running like clockwork.

Valuable customer actions translate into conversions. 

To adapt and finesse your digital presence, you need to understand which elements of your offer are driving those conversions. You also need to consider where you have the unenviable sound of silence, and what can be done to fix that.

How Does Conversion Tracking Work? 

If you're unsure what Google Analytics tracks, it's helpful to get a grip on the activities behind your conversions. For example:

  • How long is the average user session?
  • Which pages do customers visit during each website activity?
  • What are your bounce rates looking like, and where?
  • Where is the bulk of your traffic originating?

You can log into your Google Ads dashboard and create a conversion action. This is also the activity you want your customer to perform.

Those actions could be purchasing an item, signing up, installing your app, or submitting a contact form.

Precise conversion tracking process depends on the source. You can capture conversion data across keywords, ads, campaigns, and ad groups. These are key in  understanding how to amend your advertising.

Benefits Of Using Conversion Tracking

So, your sales figures are on point, and you're happy that conversions are pretty decent. Do you need to know what conversion tracking in search can help you measure?

The answer is yes.

User preferences change, markets adapt, and conversion rates are rarely (if ever!) stable from one week to the next if you don't make any adjustments.

Here's why you need to incorporate conversion tracking in your SEO efforts:

  • Identify top-performing keywords, ads, campaigns, or ad groups. These are your star drivers generating those valued customer responses.
  • Evaluate your ROI to make smarter choices about where you invest your ad spending to maximize results and understand the strength of your copy.
  • Optimize campaigns to align with your business targets, using smart bidding opportunities to automate your ads.
  • Assess where keywords aren't converting or where you need to spend time adding to your web content to push visitors to convert.

These pieces of information combine to inform your efforts and appraise where you see incredible results and which pages, CTAs, ads, or promotions are crying out for refinement.

Data-driven decisions are the goal here, so you've got quantifiable, real-world metrics behind each choice you make.

How To Align Conversion Tracking With Your Objectives

Now that we get why conversion tracking is vital and understand the robust data it feeds back into your sales strategy, it’s time to show how exactly you can use this resource to achieve your big-ticket goals.

The first step is to evaluate which specific actions you're trying to encourage.

For example, if the aim is to increase contact form submissions, spending hours updating your app’s download speed is not much use.

Instead, you'll want to look at things like:

  • How many clicks are required for customers to land on the right page from their point of initial engagement?
  • How many visitors end sessions before they click submit?
  • How often is a contact form partially filled but abandoned before it crosses the finish line?

Conversion tracking helps you spot opportunities to guide your visitor towards your target action continually.

Therefore, linking Google Ads to Google Analytics is a simple way to keep an eye on measurable actions and get into the detail of micro conversions to see what exactly happens after your customer clicks on your ad.

By keeping these concepts in mind, you can use conversion tracking to help you measure the current performance of any CTR optimization you may have undertaken, and give you further guidance on strategies to employ going forward. 

Kyle Roof

About the author

Kyle is best known for revealing the “secret” hidden in plain sight: Google’s algorithm is an algorithm. In other words, it all comes down to one thing - Math. Kyle demonstrated this by ranking number one in Google with a page consisting of gibberish text and only a handful of target keywords. Google actually punished him for exposing their algorithm by de-indexing 20 of his test sites and creating a rule in an attempt to de-value his efforts. Kyle has spent the past several years running more than 400 scientific SEO tests to better understand Google's algo. The combined results of those tests became the backbone of the popular SEO tool, PageOptimizer Pro, and they are implemented within his SEO agency on client sites. Kyle also shares his techniques in podcasts, at conferences around the world, and within the platform he co-founded, IMG, a sort of Netflix for SEOs with an active community aspect.