Tracking conversions as well as clicks is essential if you want to make a profit from your online business.
Unfortunately conversion tracking is a tedious and confusing process but one which you need to master in order to succeed.
Without conversion tracking you cannot know which of your traffic sources is providing you with leads and customers as opposed to just clicks (which may or may not be made by real people) and you have no accurate means to measure how profitable your paid ad campaigns are.
Once you can identify profitable ad campaigns, you can increase your budget for those traffic sources that work and stop wasting money on any sources that don't perform.
First of all, let's look at what types of conversions can be tracked.
Here are some of the marketing funnel conversion metrics we can measure for a given traffic source.
- Basic Click Tracking
- Call to Action Click Tracking
- Lead Capture Page Conversion
- Sales Conversion Tracking
Basic Click Tracking:
If you are using a traffic source where your visitors are in no way incentivized to click your link such as Twitter or Youtube, simply counting the number of clicks the link you include in your tweet, or the link you add underneath your Youtube video receives will give you some valuable information as people won't click the link unless they are inspired to do so by your tweet or video.
Tracking clicks generated via incentive traffic sources (where people are rewarded in some way for clicking your link) like traffic exchanges and ptc sites doesn't really give you any meaningful data other than whether or not the sites are delivering the clicks allocated to your campaign(s). For this kind of incentivized traffic, and paid traffic sources like ppc ads and solo email ads, you need to use more in-depth conversion tracking methods.
Call To Action Click Tracking:
This is a way to measure whether people who land on your site from a given traffic source are interested enough in your offer to click a call to action button and learn more about it. This can give you an indication of the level of engagement generated by a particular traffic source. Here is a link to another blog post I wrote about call to action click tracking.
I particularly like to use this tracking method as it is very easy to use and quickly gives you an idea of whether or not a traffic source is worth your attention, as people click buttons more often than they submit their email addresses and much more often than they buy things, so you can gather data quicker.
Lead Capture Page Conversion:
This is the metric we measure to determine how many of the visitors you receive from a particular traffic source go on to become email leads. It enables you to calculate your cost per lead (CPL) for a given paid traffic source.
Lead capture page conversion tracking involves recording which traffic source delivered the new subscribers who land on the thank you page of your funnel ie. the page your new subscribers reach straight after submitting their email address to receive your lead magnet.
One way to do this is to create a different thank you page tracking link for every traffic source you use.
You then create a new duplcate lead capture page for each traffic source, each with a duplicate version of your sign up form in it which redirects your new subscribers to the corresponding thank you page tracking link for that traffic source.
Tracking the number of unique clicks your thank you page tracker link for a given traffic source received will give you the number of leads generated by that traffic source.
Dividing the number of leads you generated by the number of unique clicks your lead capture page received and then multiplying that decimal by 100 will give you your lead capture page's conversion rate percentage for that particular traffic source. Dividing the cost of the traffic by the number of leads will give you your Cost Per Lead (CPL) for that traffic source.
Sales Conversion Tracking:
If you're tracking sales conversions for your own product from a particular traffic source, then creating multiple thank you pages – one for each traffic source, each with a different product payment button and tracking link for your product access page corresponding to each traffic source will enable you to determine which traffic sources are sending you buyers by tracking clicks to each product access page tracking link.
If you're promoting affiliate offers, you don't control the buy buttons your leads click or the access pages that people who buy those products reach so you cannot use the above sales tracking method. However, depending on the affiliate network you are using, you may be able to track affiliate sales conversions by creating multiple affiliate links, each with a tracking id which corresponds to a different traffic source.
This image illustrates how to add tracking code to a Clickbank affiliate hoplink:
Adding tracking code to your Clickbank affiliate links enables you to track which traffic sources converted sales.
You can add a different code for different tracking sources. This link is a Clickbank hoplink for an affiliate marketing training product and I added a tracking id. so that, if any sales are generated by the link, I will know that the sales conversions came from this blog post:
https://37d90kfmldvk1udb2q5a1l6vej.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=clickmarketerblog
These tracker affiliate links can then be put on duplicate copies of your thank you page corresponding to each traffic source. I know that this process would involve creating multiple thank you pages rather than just multiple tracker links for the same thank you page but knowing which traffic sources send you buyers is extremely useful and enables you to scale your business faster.
Conversion Pixels
If you have access to the html code for the ‘goal' page that your visitors reach following a conversion that you wish to track eg. your thank you page for a lead generation conversion or product download page for a sales conversion, you can use something called a conversion pixel to track visits to that page. This conversion pixel is basically an invisible image on the page and every time someone loads the image by visiting the page, a visit is tracked. Each conversion pixel you use is tagged to a particular traffic source so that you can count the number of conversions produced by that traffic source. You need to create a duplicate goal page for each traffic source, each with the correct conversion pixel corresponding to that traffic source, so that your tracking results are accurate. You place a conversion pixel on a page by adding a string of code into the html code for the goal page. Both using conversion pixels and using specific tracking links for your goal pages do the same job ie. recording visits to your goal pages and thereby tracking conversions.
Branding Your Tracking LInks
If you have your own WordPress site and you want to create tracker links using your own domain name, you can use a premium WordPress plugin called PrettyLinks that enables you to create branded tracker links. It is the self-hosted tracking solution I usually use for my funnels and much cheaper than most other tracking services. There is a free ‘lite' version of PrettyLinks but it lacks some of the capabilities of the pro version including, among other things, link cloaking and conversion reports.
LeadsLeap
LeadsLeap is a software-as-a-service click tracking solution that you can use to track both clicks and conversions and it does not require you to have a website of your own. For each link you track, you can create up to 2 different conversion pixels which enable you to track conversions coming from the link in question to 2 different goal pages eg. a thank you page and a product download page. Leadsleap tracker links also enable you to identify ‘real' traffic made by actual people and ‘fake' traffic made by bots by counting total clicks, unique clicks and real clicks without the need to set up any complex conversion tracking systems with multiple goal page tracking links or mulitple duplicate goal pages with different tracking pixels embedded into them. This is an ideal feature if you don't want to go to the trouble of tracking visits to your thank you pages or product download pages but still want to get some meaningful data about the quality of your traffic sources. Leadsleap links also include an incredibly useful measurement in their tracking statistics called “Response Tracking” which is a rough conversion measurement for actions such as clicking a link on a page, playing a video, clicking a LeadsLeap Adbar or filling in a form. In fact, LeadsLeap enables you to perform professional level tracking activities, that most other services will charge you for, for free, for life, which makes it a truly exceptional resource for marketers. With the Leadsleap Pro account you can even track links via your own domain name(s).
You can also access very effective free advertising at Leadsleap, as long as your offers are related to making money online or marketing as most of the people who see your ads will be primarily interested in those topics.
You can even earn money with their publishing program!
If you want to learn all about Leadsleap and what it can do for your business please get started here.
