The Art of Tracking the Click

Think of it like this: SEO is like bringing horses to water. Conversion Optimization is like getting the horses to drink. But even after the horses drink, there’s still more to know. Which horses drank in particular? And for all the horses that took a drink, did they all drink the same amount? Why do some horses drink, and other don’t?

Confused yet? Okay, let’s substitute humans back into the equation. We’ll call them visitors – visitors to a website. Now let’s turn those visitors into prospects or leads. It begins with how they find your website. If they are searching for your website, either by name or by what you do or offer, these visitors have an implied interest in your business already. That turns them into leads.

So the leads have come to your website with the potential to take action. How do we get them to bite? That’s where conversion optimization comes in. Companies are now spending enormous resources to turn leads into customers from their websites. But in the fray, in the heat of lead-conversion battle, often times, the only things that get tracked are:

• How many of our leads turned into sales?
• How much did we spend to get them here?
• and How much did those leads actually buy?

And that unfortunately, only gives you half the picture. Any website that counts on conversions must look at the entire conversion process. This includes things like:

• Tracking all sources that leads come from
• Tracking their movement across your site from entry to exit across all pages
• Tracking every action that is taken or NOT taken

These may sound extremely basic and overly obvious, but let’s apply them to some real world examples.

Example 1:

A legal client was seeking to follow in the footsteps of their competitors by seeking cases through an online form.

The original form mirrored that of their competitors in terms of length and how it was configured as button to click on first and then go to the form. Initial results were not encouraging. However, with solid analytics in place to measure what happens after the click with metrics such as form abandonment and through the use of multivariate testing, things began to change.

First, the overall form length was shortened. Then it was converted into a two part form with only three lead-in fields required which carried over to the second part of the form after the continue button that asked no more than three further questions. Form completion by visitors literally doubled in three months. Then, with further testing on where the first part of the form was positioned on the homepage, the ideal spot was found.

This resulted in an overall form completion rate of nearly 90%. The form was then placed on every page of their website and much to the delight of the client the competition began to follow their lead.

Example 2:

A client was considering cutting back on their pay per click budget because they had been told by an outside source anecdotally, that visitors who arrived on their website after organic searches were “better” than those who came from paid search. By segmenting out branded searches (those who already knew the client’s name) from true organic searches and keeping PPC traffic segmented out as well, it was discovered that:

While organic searches produced more visitors to the site overall, PPC produced over 74% more form visits and the completion rate on those same forms was 91% for organic search vs. 95% for paid search. The client realized the value of their PPC campaign and did not cut the budget.

Example 3:

A home services client was struggling to determine what types of leads he was getting through his online efforts. A system was setup to track all leads that came into the client’s site by source (referral, ppc, organic search and branded searches and direct traffic) and then capturing all form information into a trackable database that coincided with actual emails received by the client. Once all these metrics were lined up, follow up reporting was developed further to show, by individual, how many leads actually closed into sales and appointments giving the client not only a tracking mechanism, but showing whether each lead, by name, had turned into a sale or not. This made it possible for the client to not only observe closing ratios, but also to measure which of his primary service offerings were the easiest to sell to internet leads.

So if you’re in the game of trying to get your website to actually generate business and make money, you need to understand as much as possible about who’s coming to visit and what they’re doing or not doing when they get there.