10 Useful Conversion Tracking Facts
The 10 Conversion tracking facts should be to performance marketers, what a radar is to an aviator! You might be the most talented content writer, a devious funnel marketer, or a PPC superstar, unless you can attribute your conversions to the right channels, keywords, campaigns or subscribers, your creativity won’t be rewarded as it should be.
What accurate conversion tracking helps with
- Scale your campaigns
- Improve your content
- Fine-tune your funnels’ flow
- Improve your Funnel Targeting (TOF, MOF, BOF)
- Adjust your PPC bids: Manually or Automatically
- Leverage Google and Facebook Artificial Intelligence…
- …
- Apply your secret sauce…
I’ve formatted this post into a timeline that walks you through the conversion tracking steps, so that you can fully grasp the importance of each data point.
10 Conversion tracking facts to remember!
You can’t attribute conversions to a marketing channel unless you track the conversions in the first place.
Tracking a conversion is pointless unless you know the conversion context – such as time, monetary value, product, conversion type.
Since the conversion’s context describes a human behavior, it’s only fair to say that being able to tie the conversion to a user is an important optimization factor.
Attributing conversions to users can only be achieved when you control and instrument your first party data collection.
First party data is composed of user unique identifiers that are either supplied by the user, or set by your analytics and pixels providers (Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics).
Analytics and Pixel providers rely on your first party data, as well as the unique “click_id” to track and attribute conversions to your ad campaigns.
True! The “click_id” parameter is one of the essential “keys” used to attribute a conversion, but it’s only a piece of the data generated during the customer journey.
The customer journey starts with a visit and eventually ends with a purchase. While measuring the customer journey is the only way to improve your marketing activity, it’s pointless unless to you can tie each touch point to your analytics and ad networks.
Analytics and ad networks client-side pixels tend to be greedy, as they try to attribute a maximum of conversion to their ads. The infamous “thank you page” is firing all pixels, regardless of the “last click” interaction.
Tracking conversions is essential, that’s true, but being able to control your last click attribution, orchestrating the conversion data, and sending such conversion data to your analytics and pixels is paramount to any data driven business.
Conversion tracking facts takeaways
Because conversion tracking is such a complex topic, dozens of conversion tracking platforms are fighting to get you on board. You are being promised Artificial Intelligence, automation, algorithmic optimization, and perhaps even a cool t-shirt if you sign up for their service!
If that wasn’t enough, the most popular marketing blogs often tell you that you just need Google Analytics to track your conversions.
True, Google Analytics is an incredible platform, but it’s so vast and full of features that even the top marketers are often overwhelmed, and eventually overlook its true power.
And yet, most conversion tracking platforms omit the little tiny details surrounding user-level attribution, and how it can impact your campaigns.
Here is what you should do next:
- If you’re promoting a website or funnel through several traffic sources, you should not overlook the power of cross network audience building.
- If you’re promoting an ecommerce store, you want to be 100% accurate when it comes to controlling your last click attribution.
- When you run a lead generation campaign, your ability to leverage each step of your funnel to build custom and lookalike audiences will supercharge your campaign targeting.
Laurent Malka is the Co-Founder of Anytrack. He was born and raised in Switzerland, and now lives and works in Israel. He is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in marketing and business development. Laurent has been a panelist and speaker at numerous digital marketing events including SEMrush and IG Affiliates. He prides himself on his ability to connect the dots across disciplines, industries, and technologies to solve unique challenges.
