Effective tracking for your website [on.click VLOG]

May 9th, 2018

When it comes to having an accurate tracking system in place, many businesses can be put off by the perceived time and cost involved. But what about the time and money you could already be wasting through guesswork rather than data-backed decision-making?


Are you monitoring and tracking visitors’ activity on your website? If not, you could be missing out on realising your site’s full potential and overlooking opportunities to save money. For example, how much do you currently spend on display advertising or SEO without knowing how many and what type of phone calls the traffic generates? Paid Search (PPC) Executive Ant Valente talks through the top five ways to establish whether you’re tracking actions on your website as effectively as you can.

1. Establish what you want to track

If you run an eCommerce business, not only can you track the number of purchases, but also the correct amount of revenue for each of those. If you’re more of a lead gen company, you may want to track form completions, phone calls and identify which channels those conversions have come through, newsletter sign-ups, messag though contact us page so you can establish where these actions are coming from.

2. Ensuring all traffic tagged up properly

This will help to show you which channels are driving the most traffic so you can allocate your budget more effectively. URLs in your Google Ads account that are redirecting incorrect or going to 404 pages could see high amount of clicks in Google Analytics (GA), but the number of sessions that are recorded will be significantly lower. This will cause an issue in knowing where your Google Ads budget is going.

3. Make sure you’ll got Google Tag Manager (GTM) installed on your website

This means you don’t necessarily need a working knowledge of JavaScript or be a web developer in order to install different tags and track certain actions.

4. Use GTM to check form ID, and associate this with the Trigger Type: Form Completions

This sends an Event to GA that allows you to track conversions through a Goal in GA, which you can then pull through to your other advertising channels such as Google Ads.

5. Use website call conversions

A very common use for GTM is call tracking. This allows you to work out which part of your Google Ads account users have come through when they’ve made a phone call to your business. If you can’t attribute this accurately, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. One way to get around this is with Website Call Conversions as a Conversion Type. This uses a piece of JavaScript which you can easily add to any page on your website which changes the number to a unique Google forwarding number. If a user calls that number, Google will be able to tell you which ad they’ve come from, the keyword their used, and their location. You need to be careful that you set it to a DOM ready page, rather than all Page Views to ensure that everything has loaded on the page before the tag fires and therefore before the unique number has loaded onto the page, which means you could be missing out on a number of call conversions.

Watch Ant explain these principles in more detail below.


We can provide a free, no-obligation audit of your current position in the market and how it could be improved with a bespoke search marketing strategy. Contact us today – we’d love to hear from you!

Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin Youtube