Tracking Conversions in Google Analytics

Conversions are essential to understand and optimise the customer journey, feed data into marketing platforms such as Google Ads and understand the Return of your Investment when investing in online marketing. Conversions are the lifeblood of online success, and measuring them is key to achieving your marketing goals. In this post, we’ll explore the importance of tracking conversions and how it can help your business grow.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion is the goal of your online marketing strategy. It’s when a visitor takes a desired action on your website, moving from being just another session on the website to an engaged customer. Conversions can take various forms, depending on your business and objectives. In this post we will concentrate on those that directly impact growth and ROI.

Conversion Examples 

1. Contact Form Submission

Visitors filling out a contact form on your website to get in touch with you.

2. Booking

For businesses like a hotel or travel agents a website booking is an important conversion.

3. Purchase

E-commerce websites measure conversions as website purchase.

4. Request a Demo

For SAAS businesses you might be wanting to arrange demo’s of your software via your website.

5. Phone Call 

For many businesses, people will call from the website.

There are various other conversions that also directly impact growth and ROI. Request a call back, Chat Bot completions and brochure downloads are a few, but every business is different and you will need to work out which best fits your business model.

Determining What Conversions to Track for Your Business

Choosing the right conversions to track is a critical step in leveraging Google Analytics effectively. Consider your business type, industry, and objectives. Let’s take the example of a hotel:

Imagine you’re the owner of a boutique hotel. Your primary revenue source is room bookings, table bookings and weddings. In this case, your key conversions to track will include:

Online Room Booking: When a visitor reserves a room through your website

Online Table Booking: When a visitor reserves a table in your restaurant

Wedding Enquiry: Someone contacting you about a wedding or requesting a tour of your venue

Calling your Hotel:  Since many guests may still prefer to make reservations over the phone, a phone call is also a conversion

Contact Form Submission: For general enquiries, people will convert via your contact form.

It’s important to track any other conversions you have. In the case of a hotel they might also have a spa or conference rooms that need conversions to track online performance. The wedding venue might have a brochure download or the ability to book a tour of the venue.

Think about your own business and the conversions that take place that will directly affect its growth.

Understanding Conversion Value and its role 

Once you have set up conversions in Google analytics it’s important to ensure there is a value associated with it. Below are some common conversions and how to create a value.

Bookings – Often businesses like a hotel will utilise booking software meaning that people will leave the website to book on another platform. Utilising cross domain tracking we can follow that journey; tracking if they have converted, from what channel they converted from and the value of the booking. This is then fed into Google Analytics. It’s worth checking when you sign up for a booking software that it integrates with Google Analytics.

Table Bookings: Often a table booking in a restaurant is completed via a form on the website; as with room bookings this usually utilises additional software integration. It’s not possible at this stage to understand the value of this conversion, however, we can input an average value into Google Analytics. Work out your average cover value as a starting point and input that as the value. 

Phone Calls – If your business gets over 20% of their conversions via a phone it’s worth considering call tracking software. The software allows you to track what marketing channel drove the phone call and you can see as far back as the keyword or landing page the person used or landed on when starting their journey. To track the value, you can input this into the call tracking software directly, which is then pulled into Google Analytics. If that’s too time consuming you can put in an average value as per the table booking example above.

Book a Demo – Again this is a conversion where you are going to need to work out the value you put into Google Analytics. By working out how many demos convert into a customer and the value of someone purchasing the software, you can work out an average value. For example if 1 in every 100 demo booking ends up as a customer and the average value of a customer is £10,000, you can input a demo booking conversion value of £100.

Contact Form Submission – As with booking a demo you will need to calculate the average value of a contact form. It’s important in this instance to try and reduce the amount of spam you receive as this will affect the accuracy of your data. You can also make your contact form data more accurate if you have multiple contact forms; one for each service. 

The importance of adding value to a conversion.

Tracking ROI

Taking the Book a Demo example above, you need to understand how many demo bookings you need to acquire for your marketing activity to be profitable. If you are spending £5000 per month on your Pay Per Click and your target is to hit an ROI of 500% – based on the calculations above you would need 300 demos in order to create £30,000.

By understanding and assigning values to your conversions, you can track the ROI of your marketing campaigns and make informed decisions about where to focus your efforts for maximum impact.

Google Ads 

If you are tracking conversion values in Google Analytics you can set up campaigns to optimise themselves to hit a specific Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS). This is often a great way to hit the required ROI as the Google Ads algorithms will optimise themselves to target those keywords that make you money. 

If you are not feeding conversion values into Google Analytics your Google Ads account could suffer and target the wrong type of people.

Tracking conversions in Google Analytics is a fundamental aspect of digital marketing. It allows businesses to gauge their success, make data-driven decisions and optimise their strategies. By determining the right conversions to track, understanding conversion values, and inputting average conversion values, you can maximise the benefits of this essential tool. In a digital world where data is king, conversion tracking is your key to unlocking success.