Conversion Tracking: Are You Driving Blind? [Infographic]

Jacob Baadsgaard — March 23, 2017 Follow @jakebaadsgaard

Does sifting through web analytics data drive you nuts? I mean, how important is tracking conversions, really?

While you might not have started a business or become a marketer because you love crunching numbers, but the fact of the matter is, setting up and using online conversion tracking is more important than you might think.

Are You Driving Blind?

Let me put it this way, would you drive on the freeway with your eyes closed? If you can’t see where you are and what’s ahead of you, you don’t have a very good chance of getting to your destination.

For online marketers, conversion tracking data is the digital equivalent of a driver’s eyes and ears. Are you drifting off course? Conversion data will let you know. Is there a turn in the road ahead? Conversion data will tell you.

Essentially, your conversion data tells you which aspects of your online marketing are working, where you need to fix things and where you need to hit the brakes.

But, if you aren’t tracking conversion data properly, you can’t really see what’s going on with your online marketing campaigns.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the sort of situation most businesses are in. At Disruptive, we’ve audited well over 2,000 AdWords accounts. Now, it’s incredibly easy to set up conversion tracking for an AdWords account, so you’d think that every account would have high quality conversion tracking in place.

However, you’d be wrong.

Across all of the accounts we’ve audited, we found that 42% of AdWords accounts are not tracking conversions:

In other words, 42% of AdWords advertisers are effectively driving blind. For marketing channels where conversion tracking is more difficult, I’d be willing to bet that even fewer businesses are effectively tracking conversions.

What’s more, of the 58% of AdWords advertisers who are tracking conversions, only half of them are actually tracking all their conversions. The other half are only tracking about two-thirds of their conversions.

So, while they might not be driving blind, they are driving with the blinders on…

This is good news for you.

If 42% of your competition is driving blind and you’ve got your eyes open, that gives you a huge advantage. After all, without conversion tracking, your competition can’t optimize their online marketing campaigns for maximum profitability.

You can, which means you have a huge edge over the competition.

Even if you aren’t currently tracking conversions, simply by taking the time to set up effective conversion tracking, you can take control of your online marketing and quickly beat out the competition.

What You Can Do With Your Data

Now, it’s one thing to say, “By taking the time to set up effective conversion tracking, you can take control of your online marketing and quickly beat out the competition”, but analytics data is just numbers, right?

Can you actually use those numbers to improve things for your business?

To show you how this works, let me tell you a little story about one of my first AdWords clients. Early on in my career, I worked with a client that operated in a very competitive market. In the first twelve months that I worked for them, our cost-per-conversion doubled.

Things weren’t looking good.

Fortunately, I had put together a great analytics setup for the client, so I decided to see if I could use their analytics data to find a way to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns. I had to do quite a bit of digging, but then I discovered something remarkable—the majority of our sales were coming from an unusual set of keywords.

As it turned out, I had added those keywords almost on a whim and forgotten about them. But, as I went back through our data, I discovered that those keywords produced leads and sales at one-quarter the cost of our other keywords.

More importantly, there was an almost infinite number of searches on these keywords and no one else in the industry was bidding on them.

Once the data opened my eyes to what our target market really wanted, I realized that my client’s entire industry was way off course. There was a huge marketing opportunity ripe for the taking…and no one was seeing it.

Everyone was driving blind.

Needless to say, I talked to the client about my discovery and we quickly built out campaigns around these keywords. Overnight, our cost-per-lead plummeted:

This breakthrough was so big, in fact, that it completely overwhelmed my client’s sales team. Instead of fighting for leads, the company was now fighting to hire enough sales people to handle all of their high-quality leads!

Within a couple of years, the company increased its staff by 10x. They made millions in profit and received multiple rounds of VC funding. So, was all that conversion tracking data useful? Absolutely!

Conclusion

Pouring through online analytics data may not be the most exciting thing you do as a business owner or marketer, but the results of your findings can redefine the future of your company—and that’s exciting.

The only question is, are you happy driving blind?

How do you approach online analytics? Do you find it helpful? Did any of this data surprise you?

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