Conversion Tracking.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion Tracking Is King

Traffic is the life blood of any website. Whether it’s a drop shipping site selling all kinds of household products, or the personal store of a webcomic or band trying to push its creations, if no one sees a website then it might as well not exist at all. The key to making sure that a website gets traffic, aside from making sure it’s built with proper search engine optimization, is to advertise it. Of course, with the way lots of Internet advertising works, that can be easier said than done. The reason for that is that not all traffic a website receives from advertising is good traffic.

There’s Such a Thing as Bad Traffic?

In a matter of speaking. Say that a website decides to take out an ad with Google. That ad automatically shows up with certain keywords, so that when someone types in relevant keywords or visits a similar website, an ad for the client’s website shows up in a banner. Now, if someone clicks that ad they’ll be redirected to the client’s website. This increases traffic and brings a lot of people who might not otherwise have known about the advertised website into contact with it. However, that could lead to problems.

Most advertising on the Internet is pay per click, which means that for every ad that gets clicked, there’s a fee sent to the website that was hosting the ad. That site is like someone standing at the door of a shop, and telling people to go inside and have a look around. For every person that walks in the door, the shop owner pays the man a fee. However, there’s no stipulation that the walk-ins have to do anything other than walk in. They could just be browsers, who look around and then leave. They could have walked in just to help out the guy on the door, or they could have even walked in by mistake just to walk back out a second later. Doesn’t matter, the doorman still gets paid. This can lead to website owners paying a lot of fees to advertisers who, in the end, simply aren’t getting them the right kind of traffic. The right kind of traffic, of course, is the kind that comes in and buys something before it goes back out the door.

Added Insight

That’s where conversion tracking comes into the bigger picture for website owners. Conversion tracking is like a homing beacon that’s placed on the shoulder of an ad, following the people it recommends and outlining the actions they take. So if a given keyword leads to a lot of browsing but no buying, a conversion tracker is going to show that. On the other hand, if a different keyword or phrase targets a group of people that are looking explicitly to buy the product or service a website has available, then a conversion tracker is going to show a much better rate of conversion for that particular hook.

That’s the purpose of conversion tracking as a tool; to show which keywords are working and which ones aren’t. If the entire goal of a website is to convert visitors into customers (which is the goal of any website that is meant to act as an online store), then it’s important to focus advertising down and to expose the most likely population to it. Otherwise a website is much, much more likely to wind up with a lot of walk-ins that just browse and leave, but the owner still has to shell out money to the people that got that traffic to show up in the first place. The goal is to make as much money as possible by converting bigger numbers of traffic, and a conversion tracker is the first step in managing that.

What Comes Next?

A conversion tracker is just a tool that gives a website owner the information that he or she needs to see which keywords are working and which ones aren’t. What a website owner does about those keywords though, is a completely separate matter. To use an automotive metaphor, knowing that a car is leaking oil doesn’t tell the driver how to stop the leak and fix the problem.

That is where pay per click managers, or more experienced website owners and SEO experts come into the picture. These professionals have the ability to look at what the conversion tracker is saying and to turn it into actionable information. These people can provide valuable insight, and they can help website owners narrow their focus so that, while they might get less traffic overall, the traffic they do receive has a much higher rate of conversion from a browser to a buyer. As a business owner that is precisely the sort of thing that should be top priority; spending as little on advertising as possible, and turning as many shoppers into buyers with as little effort as can be.

It’s for that reason that so many people choose to allow the company that has audited their website or web content to go through and tinker with it to make it the best it can possibly be. Once a service has already audited a website, it has gained a familiarity with it that puts it a cut above other individuals that might offer the same services, and if the site has been audited then the problems are already a known quantity for that company. Why go somewhere else and require that company to start over from scratch?

How Hard is SEO?

If search engine optimization was easy, then there would be no reason to build entire companies around providing the service in the first place. Understanding SEO in theory can take a lot of research and time, but learning how to really and effectively make it work can take even longer. It also takes time both in the classroom as well as time in the field, so to speak, tweaking websites and following up on what the rules used by certain websites and search engines actually are. For many individuals that need SEO services today, they don’t have time to settle in and learn to do it themselves. That’s why they find experts, first to audit the site, and then to fix the errors found, if those errors are serious enough to keep a website off the front page of the search results.