Don’t Overlook Conversion Events

In our industry, we tend to become obsessed with topics like Keywords, Demand, Ranking, Paid Campaigns, Optimization, Algorithm changes, etc. What we tend to lose sight of is the real point of search – what do people do when they get to your site? Search is simply one of many vehicles to get qualified traffic to specific website pages.

Most marketers tend to forget that it doesn’t end there. Traffic can at times be misleading. Identifying what constitutes a conversion event on your site and configuring your web analytics to measure this can provide additional insight into your overall search strategy.

Let’s say your company sells sandals. Wouldn’t you like to see what the overall percentage of search traffic that actually purchases a sandal. Wouldn’t your executives like to see that you are driving X% of purchases through your SEO efforts and how much money you are saving your company? Seems like a no-brainer right? Well it is, but it gets really complicated when you are not an e-commerce site  focused on simply driving purchases.

Let’s say your company offers financial consulting services. What constitutes an engagement or conversion event? Most often, companies like this rely on generating leads, using a “contact us” form, etc. You can be more aggressive with these type of conversion events if you have the technical infrastructure.

For example, let’s say a user comes to your site after doing a Google search on “financial consulting for SMB”. Your web analytics are configured to determine what keyword was used to get the user to that page. After 20 seconds of idle activity (user isn’t doing anything), you could launch a Live Chat application that says “we noticed you’re looking for information on financial consulting for SMB – how can we assist you today?” Food for thought.

Here’s some additional topics and questions you can ask to begin to establish a solid search conversion strategy when it comes to lead generation:

• Understand which activities on the website constitute a lead.
• Name these activities and list the pages on which these conversions occur and are tracked.
• Understand what happens offline to that lead and whether or not it is tracked.
• Is there a monetary value attached to the lead? If so, what is it?
• Outside of leads, are there other conversion actions that are valuable to the business? If so, what are they and where (which pages) are they tracked?