Analyze Conversion to Measure Success

Mary C. | 16 July 2004 |

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Analyze conversions to measure success

You spend money, time, and effort to drive traffic to your website. To get the best use of your budget, you’ll want to focus your money on those campaigns that produce the highest quality traffic and the most revenue in the form of bookings. This month, we’ll look at conversion reports and how they help you to fine-tune your marketing.

First of all, what is a conversion? A conversion happens when a visitor to your site takes an action that either results in a purchase or indicates a serious interest. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who converted. For a group of campaigns of similar cost, the ones with the highest conversion rates can be viewed as the best performers, taking into consideration, of course, traffic volumes and revenues. (A conversion rate of 50% is high, but if you only have two visitors, it only represents one transaction.)

How does the tracker recognize a conversion? During setup, we define specific pages as conversion pages. A good example is the confirmation page that appears after a reservation is completed. Whereas most pages on the site will have a generic tracking script, we will install a special script on that page. When a visitor lands there, the tracker will record a conversion.

In Blizzard Tracker ROI Edition, we can define 10 types of “actions” or conversions. (More than ten are available for an additional setup fee.) In the illustration below, action #01 is defined as “confirm reservation.” This campaign conversion report gives the results for action #01, for each campaign. In the next illustration, conversions are shown for each keyword phrase within a single campaign, Overture.

As this sample menu (below) shows, the tracker also provides conversion reports by referrer, search engine, entry pages, and more.

It is not necessary to track revenues when analyzing conversions. In the illustration below, we have setup a conversion script on the page that jumps to the booking engine.

Other conversions you can monitor include coupon requests, mailing list opt-ins, and requests for information.

Here’s a word of caution about choosing conversion pages. Some pages for which you may desire enhanced tracking get multiple page views per visitor. The most common example is the “check availability” page. Depending on how your availability pages are set up, a single visitor might repeatedly return to this page after checking different types of rooms. For example, a single visitor who comes from a click in Overture might land on your “Check Availability” page five times. This would result in a conversion rate of 500%. This rate may be more relevant to the persistence of the visitor than it is to the quality of the campaign. Nevertheless, comparisons with other campaigns might still be useful.

For more information about the new versions of Blizzard Tracker, visit www.blizzardtracker.com or call 888-840-5893.