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Tracking conversion rate is an important part of strengthening your ecommerce strategy. With correct tracking, you can predict future CPC values and see what aspects of your campaign are performing the best.
Incorrect tracking can be a hindrance for ecommerce vendors trying to optimize their business model, so it’s important to make sure you’re reliably tracking conversions across your website.
In this article, we’ll first cover under and over-tracking your conversion rate. Then, we’ll delve into a real experience had by one of our clients with incorrect tracking.
Tracking information comes from a tracking pixel, often also called a marketing pixel: a code snippet that’s added to your website and works to gather information. Having these in place is crucial for ecommerce retailers to improve conversion rates and collect valuable data to be used to improve marketing efforts.
To see if you’re under-tracking your conversions, take a look at your website traffic and see if the data contains zero conversions or zero revenue.
You can get access to this information from Google Ads: go to 'Tools' and then 'Conversions' to see if you’re under-tracking.
If you have multiple tracking pixels built into the CSS of your website, you may be over-tracking conversions, giving you an incorrect value. The cause could also be that your pixel was set up incorrectly initially.
Read more about accurate revenue tracking
During our onboarding process, we discovered that one of our clients was under-tracking their conversion value due to an issue with their website’s coding.
Prior to joining us here, the client was completely unaware of this tracking issue. Part of onboarding at Bidnamic involves a process called Reliable Tracking Periods. We use this process to investigate historical and actual tracking data before we start building out their campaigns. This allowed us to identify the issue and help the client correct it before we made any changes to their Google Shopping strategy.
Let’s take a look at the conversion data we initially found for our client:
Our client had been tracking conversions from around May/June 2019. However, conversion value had been under-tracking (or not tracking at all!) until early January 2021. This left the client with insufficient data to predict future CPC costs and made it difficult for them to optimize their PPC campaigns.
Thankfully, our Reliable Tracking Periods process was able to identify anomalies in our client’s historic conversion and revenue tracking data. This was then investigated by our data analysts who helped resolve the issue going forward.
Knowing if your tracking pixels are operating correctly is key to gathering reliable data and accurately informing your bid calculations. At Bidnamic, we only onboard clients who have correct tracking, and help to resolve any issues before fully enrolling them.
For further insight into maximizing your Google Shopping campaigns, book a demo with one of our Google Shopping specialists today.
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