Tracking and Improving Conversion

Conversion tracking helps you better understand how your customers engage with your business and take desirable actions, whether signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

A conversion is a customer action aligned with the goals of your marketing or advertising campaigns.

Conversion tracking is the monitoring of conversions to assess the success of your campaigns.

Tracking conversions can maximize your ROI, inform your budget, identify improvement areas and distinguish clicks from conversions.

This article is for business owners and marketers who want to learn more about conversions, tracking conversions and tips for maximizing conversions.

Let’s say you’ve just wrapped up a marketing campaign that didn’t produce the results you wanted. In response, you take a different approach, but that too flounders. Instead of randomly trying another style, let conversion tracking show you where your strengths and weaknesses lie.

Through conversion tracking, you can determine how strongly, if at all, your advertising campaigns are leading to your desired goals. You can then keep this information in mind for all your future efforts.

What is conversion tracking?

Conversion tracking is the monitoring of conversions, or of consumer actions that move your company closer to fulfilling a preset goal. These actions can include a customer buying an item, adding something to their cart, opening your emails, clicking on links, landing pages, and more. The metrics tracked indicate how well your company’s marketing efforts, whether email marketing or social media advertising, are achieving the desired outcome with your target audience.

Conversion tracking works by putting numbers to your marketing campaigns’ results. Through conversion tracking, you’ll learn how many people in your audience are contacting your company, subscribing to your mailing list or buying your products. Conversion tracking is most commonly used in advertising and email marketing campaigns, though you can apply it to any campaign involving clickable links that direct your audience toward a desired end goal.

Key takeaway: Conversion tracking is the monitoring of conversions to determine how well your marketing campaigns are achieving your desired goals.

What are the benefits of tracking conversions?

Among the reasons you should track conversions are:

• Maximizing your return on investment (ROI). Conversion tracking can reveal whether you’re seeing an adequate return on investment (ROI), also known as return on ad spend (ROAS), for advertising campaigns. To learn more about ROI and its importance, read the following Business 
• Allocating your budget. Your ROI and ROAS can inform your budget structure. Let’s say you’ve allocated more money to social media advertising than to email marketing, but your conversion tracking shows a higher ROI on the latter. In this case, don’t just spend more on email marketing – move money from your social ad budget to your email marketing budget.
• Identifying opportunities for improvement. If you notice that certain campaign approaches aren’t converting as well as others, you can compare these campaigns with more successful ones to identify potential change areas. For example, if you see several campaigns that target one keyword converting more than campaigns that target another, you’ll know to focus on the higher-performing keyword.
• Distinguishing clicks from conversions. Clicks and conversions aren’t always synonymous. In fact, sometimes, high click rates can obscure low conversion rates. With conversion tracking, you can determine the relationship between click rates and the achievement of your desired conversion.

Facebook Ads Result Optimization And Conversions With Pixel Events

Without a pixel, you’re more likely to lose money with Facebook ads. Pixel allows you to optimize your campaigns toward more profitable goals. 

If you want to get the most results from your ads on Facebook, pixel again is the crucial element to make that happen. 

For example, when only relying on surface-level campaign options that Facebook provides, such as clicks or impressions, while at times, they might bring the needed results. In most cases, not optimizing for conversions can lead your campaigns not to be the most profitable they could be.  

Even if you’re using non-conversion campaigns in Facebook ads, the use of pixels is still highly recommended. Improved data collection can lead to unnoticed opportunities you can use at any given time.

Facebook Pixel Retargeting

Without installing the pixel code to your website, you can’t retarget people who visit your site or interact with your Facebook ads.

Pixel enables you the use of Facebook ads in more efficient ways to improve its results and profitability.

Audience Optimization and Custom Audiences

One key element of Facebook ads is how you use custom audiences based on the website data you collect with the pixel. 

By default, Facebook provides you some basic events to choose from: 

All website visitors

People who have visited specific pages

Visitors by time spent 

Events from your website 

PageView

ViewContent

Any event you set up earlier (standard and custom events)

Choose how many days you want the people included in your audience to stay in your audience, you can choose between 1 – 180 days. 

To refine your audience, add the URL (Like your landing page) OR parameters like value or currency. 

Lookalike Audiences

Arguably one of the best features which pixel enables you is the use of lookalike audiences in your Facebook ads.

With lookalike audiences, you can quickly reach new people and customers who have the same characteristics of the people already doing the actions on your website.

Conversions: Standard Events and Custom Events

Measuring and optimizing conversions is the step you can never forget when you’re advertising online.  

Without a pixel installed on your website, you can’t measure the results of your Facebook ads directly on Facebook. Of course, you can and should use Google Analytics goals to measure your conversions from all your campaigns in one place. 

But without pixel, Facebook can’t optimize your ad campaigns to improve conversion, which makes it essential, when advertising there. 

Through a pixel, there are standard events which it tracks automatically. Such as purchases, add to carts, page views, and more. You can customize these standard events also to set up custom conversions. 

The available standard events as of now are: 

Add to cart

Initiate Checkout

Lead 

Purchase

Add Payment Info

Add to Wishlist

Complete Registration

Contact

Customize Product

Donate

Find location

Schedule

Search

Start Trial

Submit Application

Subscribe

View Content

You can apply standard events to your website using the Event Setup Tool, which you can find in the overview of Event Manager in the bottom as Add Events and selecting From The Pixel. 

Event Setup Tool Facebook

But if you need more, or your business has specific goals from advertising, you need to set up custom events for the pixel to track and use later in the ad optimization. 

Custom events can track any action from your website. For example, you can create custom events with Google Tag Manager. 

Pixel Custom Event Google Tag Manager

An important note, custom events require you to create a custom conversion, or Facebook can’t use them in ad optimization.

To create a custom conversion, you need to go to the events manager and click on ‘create’ and choose custom conversion. Find your custom event, add rules if needed, and a value if you want. Now you can use your custom event in ad optimization.