Seasoned Marketer

A conversion is simply a goal you want to achieve with your site.  A conversion can be a sale or successfully generating a lead via an email sign-up.  And by using an analytics program like Google Analytics, you can easily keep track of your conversions.

It is so critically important to track your conversions, especially if you are buying ads (either PPC or CPM).  And even if you don’t have sales conversions, you should be tracking your email / newsletter sign-up conversions.  Ideally, you should be tracking both.  And it’s so easy not to, or to forget to add the tracking code to your web pages.

By tracking your conversions, you know which keywords are performing for you and which ones are just a waste of money.  Now keep in mind, even if you have an ecommerce site, not everyone is going to buy from you on first visit.  In fact, MOST people will not buy from you on the first visit no matter how good your site is.

So it is highly unlikely you’ll have a 100% conversion rate.  And actually it’ll be more like a 0.05% to 5% conversion rates.  So if most people aren’t going to buy from you on first visit, then you’ll need to at least entice them to sign up for your newsletter (offer incentives like discounts, great info, reviews, etc. to boost newsletter sign-ups).  This process will allow you to hopefully build trust and establish a relationship with your new visitor and ideally they’ll become a customer.

But if you aren’t tracking this stuff (Google Analytics even gives you the code – all you have to do is copy and paste it into your site), then you won’t know what’s making your site successful.

And here’s a key and the real gold nugget in this article is what to do once you’ve collected a few months of conversion data.  Let’s say you are buying ads via PPC.  And you’ve been somewhat successful and you’ve been tracking your conversions.  The next step is to setup a brand new campaign and take ONLY those keywords that convert and increase your budget and run your PPC with that campaign only.

Doing just that should help you increase sales, not to mention help with branding and building your newsletter list.