Tracking Conversions With Google Analytics

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

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.