Conversion Tracking: What Is It & How Can It Benefit Your Charity?

If you ever ran any digital marketing campaign, you probably came across the terms ‘conversion’ and ‘conversion tracking’. But what do they actually mean and why should you care about them in your charity’s digital marketing campaigns? 

In this article, we explain what a conversion means in digital marketing, what options there are for conversion tracking and how your charity can benefit from it.

What is a Conversion in Digital Marketing?

In digital marketing, a conversion can be defined as any type of action a user takes on your website that has value for your organisation. What exactly you define as a conversion depends on the type of your organisation, your campaign goals and how you want people to interact with your website.

These are some of the most common types of conversions in digital marketing for charities:

• Donation: Relevant for nearly every charity that collects donations online.
  

• Purchase: If your website includes an e-commerce store, tracking the number of sales and their value is crucial.

• Signups: For example, signups for a mailing list, a webinar or a fundraising event.

• Contact: A user getting in touch with your charity via a website form, phone call or clicking a link to send you an email.

• Download: Lead magnets such as e-books or info guides that can be downloaded usually in exchange for a user’s name and email address.

• Engagement: In rarer cases, user engagement with specific pages or types of content can be a conversion, too. For example, if your main goal is to educate people or promote a specific piece of content, actions like reading blog posts or watching a video could be counted as conversion.

What is conversion tracking?

Conversion tracking in digital marketing is simply the process of collecting conversion data from your website. This includes counting the number of conversions, the Conversion Value (for e-commerce), Conversion Rate (=total number of conversions/clicks on your ads) and Cost per Conversion (=campaign spend/total number of conversions).

Google Analytics 4 (GA4), the updated version of Google Analytics, now calls conversions “Key Events”, however, the definition itself hasn’t changed. GA4 tracks some Key Events automatically but in most cases, your own setup will be required so you can track the actions that matter most to your organisation and unique situation.

The easiest way is tracking via “thank-you page” URLs, where a user can only arrive after completing a conversion action. For example, if a user completes a donation and lands on a page with the URL yourcharity.org.au/donation/thankyou, you simply track page views of this URL. Since this page is not accessible other than through completing the donation steps before, you know that a donation was made every time someone ends on your unique donation thank-you page.

Another option, when thank-you pages are not possible, is to track clicks on buttons or links. This could be the ‘submit’ button of a website form, a phone number or a hyperlinked email address on your website. This requires more advanced setup via Google Tag Manager but allows for greater flexibility in terms of the actions that can be tracked.

Regardless of the setup method you chose, the most important things are that the tracking is accurate and measures those actions most relevant for your organisation. Imprecise conversion data is as much a headache for your digital marketing campaigns as conversion tracking that doesn’t give you the insights you are looking for.

Once your setup is tested and working in Google Analytics 4, you can link and export conversion data to your Google Grant account and evaluate your Search campaigns’ performance.

Why is conversion tracking important for your charity? 

While Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads automatically give you some basic insights like clicks on your ad, time spent on your website or which pages people visited, conversion tracking goes a step further. Do people browse your website but leave without taking action? Or do they engage with your website on a deeper level and complete actions valuable to your charity? 

From a Google Ads perspective, conversion tracking reveals your best campaigns, ads and keywords and gives insights into what works and what needs improvement. Long-term campaign optimisation and strategy planning is impossible without knowing which keywords and ad messages actually deliver the results you’re after.

On a broader level, Google Analytics 4 gives you insights into where your highest converting website visitors come from. Did they come through one of the search campaigns in your Google Grant account? From your organic listing thanks to good SEO? Or any of your social media channels or email marketing campaigns? Knowing your best-performing channel is a key ingredient for long-term optimisation and strategy planning. Keep in mind this is not about the quantity of web traffic but whether these visitors are relevant for your organisation and take the action you want them to take.

If the above arguments are not convincing enough yet, conversion tracking also unlocks extra features in your Grant account such as conversion-focused smart bidding strategies that are much more powerful than simple impression or click-focused bid strategies.

And lastly, Google Ad Grant policies require you to set up at least one type of conversion action for your account and record a minimum of one conversion per month from your Grant account campaigns.

If you struggle to get your conversion tracking set up and measure the actions that are important to you, get in touch with us today and book a free intro consultation.