What Is Goal Tracking: The Complete Guide

Conversion tracking enables you to measure the success of your marketing efforts on your website. Each website has a set of goals which are the actions you want your visitors to take. Maybe you want visitors to sign up for your newsletter, purchase a product, or download a guide. 

It’s necessary to track these goals to understand how many visitors are completing them. You can also find out the reasons some visitors don’t take your desired actions. 

In this complete guide, we’ll discuss what conversion tracking is, why it’s important, and some practical tips. Also, at the end of this guide, we will introduce a goal tracking app to monitor conversions on your website. 

So, let’s get into it.  

What Is a Conversion Goal?

Before getting into conversion tracking, first, let’s see what a conversion goal is. A conversion goal is an action you want visitors to take on your website, such as adding a product to the shopping cart, clicking on a link, submitting a form, etc. Websites usually have one primary goal and several smaller goals called micro-conversions

sales-funnel

What Is Conversion Tracking?

Conversion tracking is the process of monitoring visitors’ interactions with your website and whether they convert or not. Therefore, you can figure out how your digital marketing efforts are paying off. You can understand what metrics to focus on to improve your campaigns and boost revenue growth by tracking conversions. 

Why Is Conversion Tracking Important?

Conversion tracking is essential as it shows you how effectively your website engages visitors to convert them. You will be able to identify opportunities, user behavior trends, and sudden drops in conversion rates. 

Tracking goal completion on your website will give a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not on your website. 

Here are some other reasons that conversion tracking matters:

  1. Finding what encourages visitors to convert
  2. Making more informed decisions about your marketing campaigns and spending
  3. Understanding the path users take on your website before converting

What Is the Benefit of Conversion Tracking?

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of conversion tracking:

1- Measuring the Success of Marketing Efforts

Conversion goal tracking enables you to see how many visitors take the desired action. The more users convert, the more successful your marketing efforts have been. 

If visitors don’t complete certain goals, you should focus on those areas and make improvements to increase the goal conversions. 

2- Gaining Actionable Insights

Analyzing your conversion tracking data gives you helpful insights into improving your marketing strategy to boost conversions. 

3- Achieving Your Objectives

Tracking your conversion goals helps you understand if you are getting close to achieving your business objectives. You can also figure out what you should do to progress toward them. 

How to Calculate Goal Conversion Rate

Calculating goal conversion rate is a crucial aspect of conversion tracking. Goal conversion rate indicates the percentage of website visits that lead to goal completion. To calculate this metric, simply divide the number of goal completions by the total number of website visits. This metric can tell if your content connects with your target audience or not. 

Below you can see the goal conversion rate formula: 

WatchThemLive

How to Improve Goal Conversion Rate

Conversion tracking would be pointless if you don’t aim to improve your goal conversion rate. Tracking conversions helps you understand how successfully your website converts visitors, but that’s not enough. You have to design strategies to convince more visitors to convert and increase your conversion rate

If you want to boost conversions on your website, you should dig deep into user behavior. Find out what motivates them to take action and what prevents them. These insights help you come up with ideas to convert more users. 

Here are a few ideas for getting insights into user behavior:

  • Conduct surveys to gather information about visitors needs and behaviors
  • Use a session replay tool to detect the reasons visitors leave your website
  • Use a heatmapping tool to see how visitors engage with your content 

How Does Conversion Tracking Work?

The first step of conversion tracking is determining your website’s conversion goals. Then, you need to create goals using goal tracking software. This way, whenever a visitor performs one of the desired actions, a goal will be triggered to record a conversion. This data helps you understand how you are achieving your goals. 

What Is the Best Conversion Tracking Tool?

Conversion goal tracking requires using goal tracking tools. You can use WatchThemLive, as one of the best conversion tracking tools. 

You can add as many goals as you want to this tool and track the goal conversions on your website. This is an excellent way to measure your marketing efforts and see how many visitors complete the desired actions. 

WatchThemLive also offers features like heatmaps, session replays, website analytics, and user tracking. All of these can help you track conversions more effectively. 

Here’s how you can use each feature to track goal completions and increase them: 

  1. Heatmaps: You can use this data visualization technique to see if visitors pay attention to your calls to action. For example, if you notice users are not completing a specific action, you can analyze the heatmap to find what might be distracting them from the CTA. 
  2. Session replays: This tool allows you to watch a visitor’s journey through your website. Imagine a significant number of visitors abandon your checkout page. You can filter session replays by a specific page, checkout page, in this case, to see what happens before the visitor leaves and what prevents them from converting. 
  3. Website analytics: Analyzing website analytics can give you valuable insights into how to improve conversions. For example, you can see which web pages have a high bounce rate. Then, you can focus on these pages to find out why people leave them without taking action. 
  4. User tracking: This feature enables you to track specific users on your website. You can see the whole journey of a user through your website and find out what motivates them to convert or what discourages them. 

In the next part of this guide, we’ll show you how to get started with WatchThemLive’s goal tracking service. 

Are You Ready To Start?