Setting incorrect goals, failing to identify the right conversion paths, and assigning value to non-monetary conversions are just a few of the common website conversion tracking issues. When you encounter a conversion tracking problem, don't follow your first instinct and panic. Chances are, someone before you has already encountered the same problem and found a way to solve it.
This article focuses on five common conversion tracking mistakes and ways to fix them. Understanding the causes of conversion tracking issues will help you win the sales game. Let’s learn how.
Why You Need Better Conversion Tracking to Win the Sales Game
While measuring nigeria phone number library conversions may not seem like much help in increasing your sales in the short term, proper conversion tracking allows you to determine where your visitor traffic is coming from. You can use these valuable insights into traffic flows to strategically target hard and soft sales pitches.
Tracking conversions and analyzing data won’t help you increase conversions overnight. Instead, by analyzing data patterns and making more informed marketing decisions, you can win the sales game in the long run. Plus, website conversion tracking offers other valuable benefits:
Elevated marketing campaign
Conversion tracking will help you identify how many customers you acquired during your marketing campaign that influenced sales. This way, you can evaluate the best performing elements of your marketing campaigns .
Reduced costs
Proper conversion tracking allows you to make more informed decisions that will ultimately help you reduce costs. Plus, you'll save money by allocating budget to underperforming channels.
Focus on winning strategies
Proper conversion tracking will help you make more strategic decisions. As a result, you will be able to design winning strategies that will help your business grow. For example, by tracking conversions, you can determine your most valuable marketing channels. This way, you can allocate your budget and resources based on the highest-performing marketing channels for conversions. By allocating your marketing budget and resources, you will ultimately be able to scale your marketing strategy and, as a result, increase your profits.
And this is just one example of how conversion tracking can benefit your business in real life. When you start actively tracking conversions, you'll be able to make more informed decisions that will impact your sales.
Higher profits
By streamlining your conversion tracking process, you can reduce costs and improve profits by spending more on winning strategies .
Five common website conversion tracking problems
Although most conversion tracking issues are purely technical, that doesn’t mean you can’t fix them without the help of your technical team. In fact, not all technical experts understand the dynamics and nuances of digital marketing. Therefore, marketers need to recognize common conversion tracking mistakes and ways to avoid and resolve them.
If you want to avoid conversion tracking issues, it's crucial to understand the common mistakes that cause these problems. To help you get started, here's a list of the most common website tracking errors.
Setting wrong goals
Setting incorrect conversion goals and targets is probably the most common conversion tracking mistake.
“There’s no point in tracking conversions if you’ve set the wrong conversion goals,” says Liam Hayes, Digital Marketing Director at Essay Tigers . Liam shared a story of how the company initially gave the highest conversion value to clicks, which was a micro goal. At the same time, they gave zero value to request completion, which was the most important macro conversion. As a result, Liam and his team came up with misleading metrics where 50 completed requests would result in no success, while 10,000 page views indicated the best performance ever achieved.
To avoid misleading results, take a step back and determine what you want your website visitors to do on specific pages. Do you want them to submit a contact request form? Download a catalog? Subscribe to your email list? Or maybe watch a video ad for a new product?
Next, you need to separate your macro goals from your micro goals. Use this example to set your own goals:
Micro-goals (less important) : watch a product video, subscribe to a newsletter, connect to social networks , download a catalog, etc.
Macro (most important) goals : phone call, register for an event, contact a distributor, submit a request or form, etc.
Setting clear goals and separating micro goals from macro goals will help you improve your conversion tracking process and avoid misleading results. Evaluate your goals periodically to ensure they accurately represent your customers’ conversion paths.
2. Not identifying the main conversion routes
Failing to identify your top conversion paths can directly impact your revenue. Conversion paths provide better insight into your top traffic sources. In other words, by identifying your top conversion paths, you will be able to see where most of your traffic is coming from and design your marketing campaign accordingly. Therefore, you can make more strategic and informed marketing decisions and, as a result, increase your revenue.
How to address this problem?
Taking the time to understand your customer journeys will help you make smarter marketing decisions.
If you use Google Analytics, it's helpful to review the Top Conversion Paths report. It will give you insight into the most popular referral paths and how many times customers interact with each channel before converting to your website.
The Top Conversion Paths report tells you only a small part of the story about your traffic sources. If you want more in-depth insights into conversion paths, it's certainly helpful to drill down and filter the data.
3. Assign value to non-monetary conversions
If your conversion is not assigned a proper monetary value, it is impossible to measure the value of this conversion. However, some marketers mistakenly assign conversion value to non-monetary conversions.
Non-monetary conversions refer to conversions that do not directly add value to customers, such as e-book downloads, subscriptions, watching a video, and others.
How to address this problem?
It's always good to keep track of non-monetary conversions. They can help you measure engagement and customer interest. However, assigning a conversion value to non-monetary conversions can lead to misleading results. That's why you shouldn't assign conversion value to non-monetary conversions unless increasing them is the primary goal of your campaign.
4. Double counting conversions
Let's say a customer makes multiple purchases using a single click ID. If you count these purchases as separate conversions, you're counting them twice.
While counting every purchase as a conversion is a good option if you're particularly interested in the number of sales made, this method of conversion tracking can be misleading.
How to address this problem?
Update your conversion count to avoid tracking duplicate conversions. Ideally, each click identity should count as a conversion.
This conversion tracking tactic will give you better insight into your campaign’s overall performance. In particular, it will give you a better idea about whether or not a certain type of lead was generated. This is important because typically a unique lead per click adds value to your business.
If you're a Google Ads user, follow these instructions to change your double-count conversion tracking.
Sign in to your Google Ads account
Locate the tools icon in the top right corner
Find the Conversions tab under Measurement
Select the name of the conversion action you want to edit
Click Edit Settings
Click Count
Select One
Don't forget to save your changes by clicking Save and Done
For more information about conversion counting options, see this Google Ads Help page .
5. Not tracking conversions on external sites
Sometimes the conversion tracking process becomes complex, especially when the conversion action takes place on an external website. This is relevant to your business if you sell products to your customers on your website or if you use payment processors.
How to address this problem?
If you are a Google Analytics user, the best solution is to set up cross-domain tracking. This way, you can view sessions on two related websites in one session.
Please note that this requires you to have some knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, so you may want to consider asking your technical team for help unless you are comfortable editing in HTML and coding in JavaScript. This Google Analytics help page includes instructions on how to set up cross-domain conversion tracking to monitor conversions on external websites.
