Conversion tracking of your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns might seem like just so much unnecessary hassle, but it can provide you with a number of benefits. Broadly speaking, it tells you whether your overall online marketing strategy is successful, and is such an important part of understanding customer behaviour that Twitter recently worked at enhancing its tracking capabilities.
By analyzing conversion data accurately, you can obtain insights about your marketing—and your market—that can help to inform your business plan. Here are 10 reasons (in no particular order) why you should be tracking those PPC conversions 9and the non-conversions) diligently:
Determines If You’re Reaching the Right Audience
The last thing you need is to be spending money paying for click-throughs to advertisements by the wrong people. Unless you’re tracking your conversions you’re unlikely to know if you are. For example, if you’re advertising custom home building services in Lincoln City, Indiana and you keep getting traffic from users in the U.K. where there’s also a City of Lincoln, you may be reaching the wrong people. If you know about it, you can tweak the wording of your PPC ads to avoid racking up costs marketing in the wrong country.
Allows You to Calculate ROI
Your marketing budget is intended to deliver a certain level of return on investment, but unless you’re measuring the results you won’t know whether you’re reaching your target or not. If you’re expecting an ROI of 20% on your adspend each month but only realizing 5%, it enables you to decide whether to stay the course with your current strategy or re-think it.
Identifies If Your Sales Team is Dropping the Ball
Typically, PPC conversions generate relatively “warm” leads, which are passed on to either your lead nurturing or your sales team for follow up. By tracking conversions over time you can determine whether the subsequent activities are being properly implemented. A recent study conducted for Harvard Business Review shows that 71% of qualified leads aren’t followed up, and leads that are get dropped if they don’t result in a sale fairly quickly.
Enables Identification of Cost and Value of Each Visit
According to the analytics experts at KISSmetrics, by using analytical data you can follow the behaviour of visitors to your site. This enables you to determine factors such as:
- Which pages they interact with
- How long they spend on specific pages
- The route they follow while on the site
- The page they are on at the point of exit
By comparing your adspend to the activity of your visitors, it’s possible to calculate your audience engagement as well as the value of each visit (or visitor). This is more informative than having the cost per conversion alone, and the intelligence it provides can help you leverage those visitors and convert them to leads.
Shows If Your Ads are Aligned to the Buying Cycle
A study by Gleanster Research shows that 50% of all online leads are qualified, but they aren’t yet ready to make a purchase decision. Instead, they can be at any point in the buying cycle. If you have powerful customer personas in place and you’re mapping your PPC advertising to the various stages in the cycle, tracking your conversions will help you to know whether you’re hitting the mark.
Informs Your SEO
Keyword usage is a big part of any search engine optimization strategy, but if you’re using the wrong keywords in your search marketing you aren’t going to be generating many leads. Conversion tracking enables you to identify the keywords that work best so you can optimize not only your PPC ads but your online content, too.
Helps You to Do A/B Testing
Thorough testing is critical to the success of any PPC advertising, and A/B testing is the accepted formula for determining whether a campaign is working. It’s possible to test two different options accurately using conversion tracking, however, and adjust them for further testing based on the results.
Determines Your Bounce Rate
Tracking your conversions (or, once again, the non-conversions) gives you a clear picture of your bounce rate. This can highlight the areas of your website that work better than others and identify pages that may contain errors or problems. If you have an e-commerce option, then analyzing cart abandonment can help you to identify flaws such as PPC ads that could potentially mislead the customer by painting a different picture than the actual product, for example.
Conversion tracking provides you with the insights you need to improve the returns on your PPC campaigns, increase the productivity of your company and staff and measure the value of the online leads you generate.
