Tracking Conversions on Websites that “Don’t Convert”

The biggest misconception about online advertising is that there’s no way to track ROI on websites that don’t have ecommerce functionality. Business owners that maintain informational sites assume that they’ll have no way of tracking which business was generated from their online ads. This is problematic for local businesses or companies that require customers to speak with someone before placing an order or scheduling an appointment. 
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However, there is hope! You don’t have to sell anything on your website to effectively assess the return on your ad spend. There are plenty of other conversions for you to track to determine how much of your revenue to attribute to your PPC ads.

Calls
Knowing how many consumers call your business from your online ads is a key way to monitor effectiveness. This is especially true now that shopping and product research on mobile devices have become so prevalent. 

Businesses that provide quotes, schedule appointments, or answer product inquiries over the phone will find this form of tracking especially beneficial. In these instances, phone calls are the gateway to booking services and selling products, which means that they should be tracked to properly attribute revenue. 

Remember that this form of tracking isn’t completely accurate because it will only record calls that originated directly from ads. Consumers that viewed ads, clicked through to the site, and then called the business number listed on the site won’t be counted. So, while this method isn’t foolproof, it’s more effective than not tracking calls at all. 

• Use a Google Voice number in your ads to forward calls to your main business number so that you can separate ad-generated calls from all other calls.
• Set call parameters to only track calls that last 30 seconds or more to weed out hang ups from accidental calls.

Email Signups
If you have a thriving email list and can quantify how much each additional signup contributes to your revenue base, tracking email signups from your online ads will allow you to determine how much value they’re contributing to your business. You can use this information to scale efforts up or down based on results. 

• Place tracking code on your Email Signup Thank You page to pull signup data into your PPC account.

Downloads
Just like email signups, downloads of digital resources provide a way to determine which leads originated from online ads. Unlike email signups, however, this list is often more difficult to quantify independently. Instead, it should be compared to the average value of a lead from all other channels to estimate how much value it will bring to the business.

• Place tracking code on your Download Thank You pages to feed this information into your online ad platform. 

Quote Requests
Request a Quote functionality is basically just a glorified Contact Us submission form, which means that it’s trackable in the same way. While not every quote will result in a sale, you can estimate the value of these quotes by using your average sales conversion rates from quotes across all channels. 

For instance, if your company typically converts 20% of quote requests into sales and your average sale is $100, then you can determine that generating 100 quote requests from your online ads over the course of a month resulted in approximately $2,000 of new business.
This is a great way of assigning value to your paid search efforts to scale ad spend appropriately during different seasons. You can also apply this math to historical data to make conversion predictions for the coming months. 

• Place tracking code on your Quote Submitted page to track which quote request submissions came from online ads. 

Appointment Signups
If your website has the functionality to allow visitors to book appointments, tracking revenue derived from online ads is much simpler than you might imagine. Simply placing tracking code on submission pages and structuring your website strategically will give you clean data to analyze. 

• Place tracking code on your signup submission page to track which appointment bookings came from paid search.
• Create a different appointment submission page for each service to allow for more precise revenue tracking. Use page-specific data to close the loop on revenue attribution by assigning values to each page based on the margins for each service. 

Views of Key Pages
While counting a consumer’s view of a page is a pretty flimsy attempt at conversion tracking, it’s better than nothing. Google offers this conversion goal as an option for sites that don’t have anything else to fall back on. The concept behind this conversion option is to give a sense of the branding influence that a visit has had on consumers. While you can’t determine whether visitors made a purchase, you can determine if they saw something that would have given them a positive impression of your business, leaving them more likely to purchase. It’s not great, but it’s something. 
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• Choose a meaningful page deeper into your site to give a sense of how many visitors are spending time on your site digging around to learn more about what you do. 
• Identify the page within the step-by-step AdWords tracking setup screen.
• Compare data related to bounce rate and pages per visit to give a broader picture of what visitors from paid search are doing on your site to estimate their effect on overall revenue. 

Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!