Identifying Conversion Points: It Might Be Harder Than You Think

If you owned a website, you probably would want to know what it was doing for you. Heck, maybe you already do own a website and you want to know what it’s doing for you. The reality is that many people with websites don’t even track their online conversions. It seems like something so essential to a successful website, but without proper guidance, how would you even know what to look for? Whether it’s too difficult to do, they are not really sure how to implement a solution, or they don’t currently track any traffic on their website, tracking conversions can seem like a difficult undertaking.

Additionally, you might already own a website and track visitor data, but you might not be properly tracking your conversions. On an eCommerce website, it’s pretty easy to determine that a conversion is most likely a sale. When someone completes a transaction, you get money. Therefore, we can determine that this is a primary conversion for the site. Money = a conversion I care about. Done. Easy. Simple.

This is what happened when I Googled “happy rich guy.”

But where do you start when determining conversions that aren’t so easy to figure out?

Start With the Basics

The first thing you need to do (obviously) is start tracking the visitors to your website. If you’re not doing this, literally stop everything you are doing and install Google Analytics. Like, right now. Seriously. I’ll wait.

Done? Next step is to determine your goals. This isn’t something to just skim over and complete in 5 minutes. Really think about it. What do you want people to accomplish when they come to your website? Sure you want them to buy your product (if you sell products,) but what if the consideration period is longer than a quick site visit? Finding all of your possible conversion points and arranging them in priority order will help you to set up your goal tracking properly.

Map Out Your Goals

Think of your primary goals. Do you sell a product? Do you sell a service? Is your main conversion point a contact form or a “Purchase” button? Determining these goals will help you to establish proper tracking.

Next, think about your secondary goals. These are goals that do not directly affect your revenue, but may have some implications on whether a customer will return or stay connected with your business.

Take an email list sign-up for example. If you’ve determined that a number of customers come back to the site to purchase a product every time you send out an email blast, that email sign-up is now worth something to you. By tracking this goal you can determine not only what that sign-up is worth, but also the potential value of your email sign-up form in a given month.

This works with content downloads as well (if you’re not up on writing some awesome content yet, you need to get moving ASAP.) If you have an awesome whitepaper you allow visitors to download, track it as a goal. You can then determine how many people are downloading your awesome whitepaper and how this can affect conversions.

The best way to ensure you’ve got all of your bases covered is to map every single conversion point out on paper or a whiteboard. Organize them by primary and secondary goals and determine the value of each (if possible.) Here are some examples of all of the possible conversion points you might find:

• Product purchase
• Whitepaper download
• Newsletter sign-up
• Email sign-up
• Blog sign-up
• Contact form
• Live chat

Take It To the Next Level

At this point, you should literally be dissecting your website piece-by-piece to uncover every last conversion point. You want to know everything about your website and finding these areas on your site is the key to understanding how you’re website is benefiting you.

However, for non-revenue generating conversions you might need a way to understand how it is affecting your bottom line. At this point, you’re ready to take it to the next level.

In Google Analytics, you can assign a dollar value to all of your website goals. This means that if you have predetermined that an email sign-up is worth $10 to your company, you can assign a $10 value to this goal completion in GA.

At the end of the month, you can then tally your data to determine how much potential money you made off of email sign-ups for the month. While it is not 100% specific data, calculating these values for all of your conversion points can help you gauge trends in revenue for your secondary conversion points and show you (and possibly your team) the value of these “not-as-easy-to-understand” goals.

**This is a post originally written for Marcel Digital**