How Set Up Tracking Systems on Your Website

In order to have a reasonably complete sense of what is generating sales and leads, you must have multiple forms of tracking in place. Until you are truly tracking these key items in the tracking systems list below, you are not really in a position to judge your return on investment.

How to Track Conversions From Offline Advertising

Let’s start with something that many marketers find difficult or near impossible to track: your marketing and advertising efforts generated from non-digital efforts.

I’m referring to things like:

• Radio
• Television
• Print
• Billboards
• Direct mail

It takes some extra effort, but it’s definitely possible. One of my favorite (and arguably the easiest way) is by using a unique phone number or custom URL.

Use Custom Phone Numbers to Track Offline Ads

There are plenty of VoIP phone tools that assist with this marketing approach. The concept is really simple: it displays a different number for each advertisement.

So you’ll know if people are calling in because they saw your billboard vs. the callers who heard your plug on the radio. Now you can track which offline campaigns are generating the most leads and allocate your budget accordingly.

Using a Custom URL or Landing Page to Track Offline Ads

This is another simple approach that involves driving people to specific URL or landing page for each campaign. The demo form or submission fields can remain the same, but you’d direct people to different URL extensions like:

• /television/
• /radio/
• /mail/

You could even take this one step further ultra-specific. For example, let’s say you’re advertising on three different radio stations. Set up a unique URL for each of those stations, so you can determine which one is driving the most traffic and conversions.

Create a spreadsheet of ads to track and keep notes on the URLs associated with each ad. Track the visits to your site, the number of pages visited, and what paths visitors took, then determine how many of these people actually converted online. You can set up goals for each ad campaign and see a dollar amount in Analytics for sales or leads generated.

How to Track Site Search Using Google Analytics

Do you have an internal search box on your website, and you’d like to know what keywords your website’s visitors are typing into that “site search” box? Well, you can do that, and it’s usually very simple to set up using Google Analytics.

The Google Analytics “Site Search” reports can give you lots of very useful information, for example:

• What products/services users are searching for (you may need additional calls-to-action for popular products or services)
• Whether or not the user found what they were looking for (through engagement metrics like time on site, etc.)
• Searches for products or services that you don’t have content for (but should)
• What questions users have (which you could answer on a page or blog post)

You can use the information that you gather to help you design appropriate calls-to-action, or develop new content. Now you’re using your own users to inform you about what topics you write about on your site (helpful, right?) and you’re more likely to come up in the search engine results for those keywords, and so on.

Install the Google Analytics Code on Your Site

Sign up for a Google Analytics account and install the code ASAP! Until you add the snippet of code onto all your web pages, you won’t be collecting any data. You can view reports within 24 hours, but it will take some days to get more meaningful data. The real magic happens with month-to-month comparisons over a span of years. For example, how many visitors and conversions did we get from non-branded keywords via SEO last December compared to this December?

If you’re completely new to GA, read my guide on how to set up a Google Analytics account before you proceed.

Tracking Site Search

Now that you have the code installed and adjusted, it’s time to start using analytics to improve your website and user experience.

Step 1: Navigate to your admin dashboard in Google Analytics

Step 2: Select your profile where you want to set up site search

Step 3: Scroll to the “Site Search Settings” menu and enable “do track site search”

Step 4: Enter the parameters in your website URL which contains the keywords for the site search

This is where most people get confused, and why so many sites end up without Site Search tracking. So I’ll give you a few extra tips, as Google’s help makes this more complicated than it is.

Go to your website, enter in a keyword (for example: blue widgets) into your site’s search box, and hit “Return” or click “Submit”, or “Go”, or whatever you need to click to make the search happen.

Now look at the resulting URL. Depending on how your website has been developed, this can take a number of different forms, but will usually look something like these examples:

http://www.domain.com/casearch.aspx?SearchTerm=blue+widgets&x=0
http://www.domain.com/search.cfm?q=blue+widgets&HomeSearchButton.x=0
http://www.domain.com/?s=blue+widgets&x=0&y=0

Now what you are looking for is the “parameter”, or name, in the URL that is assigned to the search term (or keyword). Usually it’s something like “SearchTerm”, “q” (for “query”), “s” (for “search”), “keyword”, etc., and you’ll find it right before the keyword and an equal sign (=). You don’t need to include the equal sign, because that’s not part of the parameter name (in fact, if you do, site search won’t work). I’ve highlighted the parameters in the examples above in red. Just note the parameter name (make sure you have all the correct capitalization and spacing) and copy or type that into the “Parameter” box in Analytics.

If you want Google to strip the search query parameter out of the URL when reporting pageviews of the search page, you can check off the “Strip query parameters out of URL” box. Normally, I don’t do this, and unless you know what you’re doing and have a specific reason for using this feature, you can just ignore this.

You can also check off the box for “Site search categories” if your site search uses a category selector (drop down menu, etc.). If you check off this box, Google adds another field to enter the Category parameter, which you find in the same way and is usually something like “cat” or “qc” (for query category), etc. Again, if you don’t think you have categories (most basic site search features don’t), you can just ignore this.

6 Additional Must-Have Tracking Systems on Your Website

Tracking offline advertising and site search using GA is just the beginning. Go the extra mile and set up these other tracking systems:

1. Form Submissions

By setting up Google Analytics and/or HubSpot to register a lead each time a form is submitted, you can see the rise or fall in your form conversion rate on a monthly basis. The “thank you” page is a key part in this process because visitors see it only after they’ve hit the “submit” button. So, you can be sure of a conversion when it is tracked as a page-view in your analytics software.

2. Shopping Cart Sales

By setting up a “receipt” page for your transactions and registering it in analytics, you can measure the dollar amount and number of shopping cart sales. You should also add a snippet of code to each step of the checkout process, known as a shopping cart funnel. That way you can see where in the funnel people drop out before the sale is complete and start to correct the issues that prevent conversions.

3. Live Chat

We have successfully increased the number of conversions on many clients’ websites by using live chat. Since some customers don’t want to call, fill out a form, or even use a shopping cart, a live chat feature can reach the customers you would have lost otherwise. Ngagelive.com allows you to have a 24/7 answering service that frees you from having to staff the chat window. Ngagelive.com doesn’t pretend to know your business; they essentially just record the visitor’s contact information and questions and tell them they will have someone get right back to them. LivePerson is another service that lets you do the chatting yourself. For law firms, we often see 30% of the leads coming from tracked live chat sessions. We can also see what keyword and search engine or social site initiated the chat.

4. Email Address Clicks

You can also tag email address clicks to register as a conversion, so those don’t go unnoticed when adding up all your sales/leads.

5. Printables/PDF Downloads

While it does not guarantee they filled out a form or provided their contact information, tagging links to the PDFs in Analytics will give you a better sense of how many people are downloading printable PDFs or applications.

You can also track any printable coupons or specials (and this can be tied into to your offline conversion tracking that we mentioned earlier).

6. Third-Party Applications

Banks and mortgage companies, for example, often don’t author the software that allows people to apply online. They commonly have to send users off their own website in order to have them access the secure application form area. Other examples of third-party applications include “booking” applications for hotels and resorts. Unless you add snippets of Google Analytics code to these off-site pages—at least in the “thank you” page of their website forms—you will never get information about how many people signed up. This is not always an easy task, because you must work with their IT people and have a knowledgeable analytics person describe exactly what to do. You should also add a snippet of code on each step of these third-party applications, which will allow you to see where the drop points are in the sales funnel and correct issues that stop conversions.

If you don’t have these types of tracking systems in place, you won’t get a full ROI picture and will likely never be satisfied with your outcomes.

Final Thoughts: Don’t Forget to Define Your Goals and KPIs

Without goals, any analytics tool is useless. Measurements that help you see how you are doing against your goals and objectives are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Depending on your industry and type of business, you will require different KPIs. You’ll also need to customize your web analytics tool especially for your site.

• Conversion rate (or conversion rate of the blog or from SEO specifically)
• Days and visits to purchase
• Average order value
• Visitor loyalty and visitor recency
• Share of search for a particular term against a competitor

Knowing just how much you can track will get you and your team excited. No strategy is complete without being driven by measurable objectives. If you have Google Analytics installed and don’t yet use it effectively, you’re about to enter a whole new world.

A successful website is one that meets the goals you define for it. Successful marketers map out how they will acquire customers, engage them, convert them, and retain them. Analytics is where the rubber meets the road in getting this done. Think about how the various reports and tactics in Analytics map to these four key areas of marketing.