Helping a friend
It’s a story from a few months ago when one of my best friends called me saying his agency was going to run ads for a product comparison site. Since they normally run ads for their client’s websites, their conversion data requirements can easily be solved using Google Tag Manager.
This time however, they needed a platform that could go beyond the classic “thank you page”.
Since he’s a good friend, he deserved the best possible service and onboarding. So we had a quick call and I suggested to hop on Zoom with his colleague to make sure they get everything right.
He politely declined the invite saying that “they’ll do just fine”.
A few hours later, as I was on my way out, my Slack started making weird noises… My friend who was attempting to become a customer was in troubles.
How do I see my conversions in Google Analytics? How do postbacks work? Why conversions are not set as Transactions in Google Analytics?
The Friend
He’s a very close friend (and still is), so it came out very casually:
We had a big laugh, and eventually we Zoomed into his funnel and analytics.
Long story short, this morning I came across a blog post by Zapier, which very politely tells you to read the user guide.
“Guides are for people who can’t figure things out on their own!”
Zapier
I admit, when I first started using Zapier I skipped their manual and deeply regretted it. If only I had read about webhooks, I would have saved myself tons of hours!
Conclusion
No matter how a software makes it easy for you to get on board, there are always tiny details that are not intuitive.
As a digital marketer, blogger, affiliate marketer, or ppc marketer, you share with your peers many common traits. Yet, one of them is paramount to your daily routine: You use many tools to run your business.
And each of these tools have their own nuances, tricks and hidden gems that wait to be discovered.
Am I talking about AnyTrack? Sure. But I am also talking about Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or even Mailchimp.
So take moment to read the AnyTrack documentation. It will save you time, frustrations, and eventually it will help you grow your business faster.
How conversion data helps your SEO?
Can AnyTrack helps your SEO? Until last week, it was not something that would have cross my mind. And yet, during a customer account audit, it became evident that a couple of features suddenly turned out to be very insightful.
AutoTrack Conversion Data
The AutoTrack feature automatically tracks and sends on-site Click Events to Google Analytics. However, since it AutoTracks external links and links that are marked as rel="nofollow" or rel="sponsored".
Bottom line, internal links are not meant to be tracked.
Event Browser
The Event Browser allows you to view your conversion data and events and its properties such as url’s, event type, event_id, conversion_id, client ID and other interesting data.
So while reviewing the data, we realized that plenty of internal links were triggering Call To Action Clicks Events . Initially, I thought we had a bug. But it’s only after we looked into the site’s source code that we discovered that the links were tagged as rel="nofollow".
Hundreds of internal links meant to produce SEO juice were in fact “declared” as external links.
Conclusion
I don’t think AnyTrack can really do much to improve your SEO. But the set of data tools it provides can definitely help you spot errors that might save your ranking.
Have a look at the Event Browser. You’ll be surprised to uncover some interesting conversion data.
