Why Conversion Tracking Matters
with Anthony Elliott
of Five Q
Anthony Elliot is a senior software developer at Five Q. On today’s episode of the Ministry at Scale podcast, Anthony joins Chad to talk about conversion tracking and why it’s so important.
For many people unfamiliar with conversion tracking, there’s one big question: what are conversions?
As Anthony put it, it has similarities to a spiritual conversion. Much like how a spiritual conversion involves a person on a journey through life interacting with something that causes a change, a conversion on a website happens when a user comes to a site and interacts with the site in some way. This could include signing up for an email list, engaging with articles, posting on social media or even donating.
Conversions are important because they provide data in order to more effectively use advertising in ways that actually work. You can start testing and optimizing based on how you know people interact with your online presence.
In order to track conversions, you need to know the journey that a user takes. Asking questions such as these can help you to understand how people interact with your site:
What are they doing on your site?
How long are they on each page?
Are they a recurring donor?
The process to set up conversion tracking can be done many ways, but the way that Anthony and the 5Q team have done it successfully is to set up Google analytics to track conversions. It can be a daunting task to begin understanding this process, but Anthony gave an example about how it works. If you wanted to track donations, for example, you can create a “thank you” page that users are taken to when they donate. You can set up google analytics to track how many people visit that specific url each day, thus tracking the number of people who donated in any given day. Another way to track this is to link your Google ads account to Google analytics in order to capture which ads are most successful and which ads need adjustment.
To learn more tips about conversion tracking and how to do it well, listen the the entirety of episode #74 of the Ministry at Scale Podcast.