Tracking conversions is one of the most important aspects of running a business online. If you don’t know how your sales pages are operating and how successful or unsuccessful they are then you have no idea on how to improve them. That’s why tracking conversions is so important.

It’s really simple to track your conversions. The difficult part is analyzing your results. Seemingly good results can sometimes be improved upon just by tweaking your sales or landing page a little. One change to your landing page can increase your conversions by a considerable amount, but to do that you have to know what to improve and that’s where conversion tracking comes in.

There are different analytics programs you can use for tracking your conversions. I like Google Analytics because it’s free and because it’s also tied to your Google AdWords account. If you are driving traffic to your landing page with pay per click ads from Google AdWords then you can track your conversions with a simple piece of code that you add to your landing page.

Don’t confuse your conversion tracking code with your Google Analytics code, however. They are two pieces of code. You’ll need to add your Google Analytics code in order to track how much traffic your PPC ads are delivering to your pages. But you need your conversion tracking code in order to track your sales. The analytics code goes on your landing page. The conversion tracking code goes on the “Thank you” page that your visitors see when they purchase your product. That’s so that the conversion tracking code can register the sale that has just been made.

To get the code, log into your Google AdWords account and click on “Conversion Tracking” in the green bar at the top of the page. On the left side of the page, near the bottom, you’ll see a box. In that box is a link using the words “Get conversion page code.” Click on that link. You’ll have to choose the type of conversion that you want to track. Just follow the instructions in that part of the Google AdWords system. It’s pretty simple.

You’ve likely heard of cookies and session IDs. The difference between a cookie and a session ID, briefly, is that a session ID expires after a user closes their browser or leaves your website. The cookie is downloaded to the website visitors hard drive and the next time they arrive at your site you are able to see what they’ve viewed or purchased in the past. That information can be extremely valuable.

1. With cookies, you can learn your users’ navigational preferences and tailor them to suit those preferences. In other words, if you have content on a tier 3 structure and there are multiple paths to a certain page, a cookie can tell you whether a visitor prefers to take Path A or Path B to get that specific content. You can then tailor your offerings to narrow down that navigational path for each user.
2. Cookies also allow you to maintain password-protected web pages, or membership sites, and show only those features that require a password to users with a cookie that has a password stored on it. Non-registered users will get the “plain vanilla” version while your registered users can enjoy all the benefits of your content.
3. Cookies can also restrict search engines from accessing and indexing certain portions or web pages on your website while allowing registered users the full benefit of the content.
4. One of the most powerful uses for cookies and session IDs is to tailor your product offerings to users based on past purchases. Amazon.com has gotten real good at this. If you know that a certain user has a preference for yellow widgets versus blue then if you roll out a new product called Super-Duper Yellow Widget then your cookie can let you know when visitors with that preference are on your site. Your content will then be tailored to make an offer to those visitors while ignoring the visitors who prefer blue widgets.
5. Cookies can also tailor your advertising toward visitors with certain content preferences - even on the same page. For instance, if that yellow widget customer decides to visit the blue widget page then they’ll still see ads for yellow widgets even though that page normally displays ads for blue widgets.
6. Of course, the most common usage for cookies and session IDs is to improve user experience. Cookies can remember your visitors’ passwords and allow them to visit your site without having to login manually every time. You can even program the cookie to give your visitors a choice about that as some users are more concerned with privacy issues.
7. Cookies can also help you tailor your advertising preferences to certain types of advertisers who have shows a tendency to prefer certain types of content over others for their advertising purposes.

Cookies are very powerful and can be useful to you, your advertisers, search engines, and your visitors. Information can be collected on all of the above from all of the above for all of the above.

When you have multiple offers on the table at one time, it isn’t enough just to engage in conversion tracking. Yes, you want to track where your traffic coming from and where it is going. But you also want to know where your sales are coming from, not just overall but for every offer that you have.

So when you do your conversion tracking be sure that you are tracking every offer. It is best if you have special tracking codes for each offer that you make. That will make your conversion tracking a lot easier. Then when you install Google Analytics - by far, the best conversion tracking system on the planet - you can track every code, every offer you have.

The great thing about Google’s conversion tracking tools is that you can track the results of any of your advertising campaigns, even if they are being run on a platform of a Google competitor. Yahoo! Search Marketing, for instance. You install the proper codes on your website and Google will track your conversions for you, giving you one source where you can keep track of all of your conversions at one time. There truly is no tool better for tracking conversions than Google Analytics. Give it a try.

When it comes to pay-per-click, there really is no comparison to Google. The search giant has received a lot of flack in the last couple of years for not curtailing click fraud, but even with that problem resting on its shoulders I’d pick Google over any other PPC model. One reason is because of its conversion tracking tool, which is totally free.

All you have to do is insert a little code into your website and Google will drop a cookie on your visitors’ computer. If they buy, the cookie notifies Google. It will become quite evident that the purchase came as a result of your Google PPC ad. It’s a simple process and I highly recommend it.

If you opt to use PPC, use Google for its conversion tracking tool.

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