Conversion Tracking: Beginner’s Guide to Tracking Conversions 

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Conversion Tracking: Beginner’s Guide to Tracking Conversions 

Being able to track conversions is essential for every business with a website. Conversion tracking allows you to measure the success of your website and marketing and reveals valuable data. 

In this post, we’ll go over the basics of conversion tracking, how to set up tracking for different platforms, and why it’s essential. 

What is Conversion Tracking 

Put in simple terms, conversion tracking is tracking metrics associated with a conversion. Most people think of conversions as a sale or form submission, but it can be a specific action that you want your users to take, such as playing a video on your website. No matter what you consider a conversion, there are some universal metrics you’ll want to track, such as the number of conversions, conversion rate, and cost per conversion.

However, some of the metrics you track will be dependent on what you consider a conversion. If you’re tracking sales, you’ll want to look at things like ROAS and conversion value. If you were to track video plays, you’d want to track something different, such as average view time. 

Why is Conversion Tracking Important? 

When you’re trying to get the best results for your brand, especially when you’re spending money on advertising, you want to be able to track your success. It’s important to be able to see how people interact with your website and see if people are buying what you’re selling. If you’re actively spending money on marketing, it’s all the more important to track conversion metrics so you can see if the money you invest is getting a return or wasting money.   

Different Types of Conversions to Track 

As mentioned before, a conversion is considered whatever action you are trying to get users and customers to take. There are a lot of different things that you can track. Most businesses use Google Analytics to track their data, and Google offers a wide variety of what you can track as a conversion. The most common are sales and form submissions, but this doesn’t suit every business.

Some brands want to count things like session duration, scroll depth, link clicks, or video plays as a conversion. It may seem weird to count these as conversions, but there are a number of reasons why a brand might want to track these. For instance, if a blog has an ad halfway through and they get paid every time someone views it, they might want to count a 50% scroll depth as a conversion. 

How To Set Up Conversion Tracking 

Setting up conversion tracking can get pretty technical. For someone who has never done it, it can seem like a very challenging task. In many situations, it can be quite difficult without proper knowledge or guidance, especially when it comes to creating custom conversion events that lie outside the standard ones, like tracking sales. However, with detailed instructions that teach you the basics, this task becomes much simpler when broken down correctly.  

Each type of conversion event that you track, whether it be sales or form submissions, will be set up very differently. Sales, for instance, have different variables that you must take into consideration and track, such as purchase value and currency code. There are even different ways to set up one type of conversion event, each with its own benefits. 

The steps you take to set up conversion tracking will heavily vary based on the platforms you are using, both for your website platform and marketing channels. If you are using something like Shopify, many integrations are made much easier than a platform like WordPress. If you are running paid ads, the setup process will be very different depending on if you’re advertising using Google, Facebook, Bing, LinkedIn, etc. 

If you’re using Shopify and want to learn how to set up conversion tracking for Google Ads, you can learn how in our blog about Google Ads Conversion Tracking for Shopify.

What Is GTM And Why Do You Need It? 

Before getting started with setting up your conversion tracking, it’s best to have an understanding of Google Tag Manager (GTM) and how to use it. GTM takes out the need for a developer for setting up most conversion tracking, unless you get into really advanced tracking that’s made for specific instances, which isn’t necessary for the vast majority of brands. 

GTM also helps you to organize all of your conversion tracking tags. It keeps all of your conversion tags in one place, which helps you visually see what your website is currently tracking. It makes it much easier to add new types of conversion tracking, and makes it easier to make quick changes if something is set up incorrectly, or something on your website changes. 

Using Different Ad Platforms 

The best part about GTM is that it integrates with other advertising platforms, so that you can easily set up conversion tracking.  

Google Ads 

To set up conversion tracking in Google Ads, you first need to create a Conversion Action on the Google Ads platform. Then, you will need to go to GTM and use the Google Ad Conversion Tracking tag, which is a template made by Google that can be found in the Template Gallery. In this template, you will need to add the Conversion ID and Conversion Label, which is generated when you set up a conversion on the Google Ads platform. 

Facebook Ads 

To set up conversion tracking for your Facebook Ads, you need to find your Facebook Pixel ID. Then, go to GTM and find the Facebook Pixel tag from the Template Gallery. In here, you will add your Pixel. After you finish creating the tag, you can then set up conversion events within the Meta Ad Manager. 

LinkedIn Ads 

For setting up LinkedIn Ads, you will need to add the LinkedIn InsightTag 2.0, and add your Partner ID and Conversion ID. When you create conversion events within the LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you will get a Conversion ID. 

Get Help with Conversion Tracking 

Conversion tracking has quite a steep learning curve, but once you learn how to use Google Tag Manager and how to set up conversion events on the advertising platform, it’s pretty straightforward.  

If you’re looking to improve your PPC strategy and get the results you’re looking for, you can check out our E-Commerce PPC Management page to learn more about how we help.