Five Excellent Free or Cheap Conversion Tracking Platforms

Posted December 19, 2012 by Karen Kouf | 1 comments

It’s tough growing your business if you don’t know which marketing campaigns work and which don’t. Are you running banner ads, PPC campaigns, Facebook promotions, or special offers with no idea which gives you the greatest ROI? You probably aren’t taking advantage of conversion tracking (sign-up for our free UpCity Daily Tips newsletter to learn more about maximizing web tracking and analytics).

Let’s begin at the end…conversion.

Conversion is when a customer takes a desired action in your campaign as specified by you. Successful conversions aren’t always tied to money but they are always tied to a goal. This might be purchasing a product, downloading a whitepaper, newsletter subscriptions. It’s important to note that conversion tracking is also a big part of affiliate marketing, links on blog ads are tracked and compensated.

In order to improve conversion, you need to track how people progressed through the process and your weak spots along the way. That’s where conversion tracking comes in. There’s a variety of definitions but basically conversion tracking allows you to look at the links/pages a customer went through before they converted and what page they were on when the decided to leave. This is done through code attached to a link. You’ll get really valuable insight into your customer’s behavior plus know which roadblocks to remove for a better conversion rate.

1. Google Analytics – Google Analytics is probably the most well known analytic provider for small businesses. They have continually improved their analytics platform and now offer social media monitoring, e-commerce,  event tracking, and more. Conversion tracking can be done on conversion goals as defined by you and/or tied to your AdWords campaign. Their funnel visualization and goal funnels allow you to ‘see’ where visitors enter your conversion path, get hung-up, then leave. The suite of tools is free but you’ll need a Google account to sign-up and get code for you site.
2. Clickmeter  – Clickmeter allows you to monitor data from your campaigns across the web—website, social media, press releases, mobile, blog, etc. You are able to measure where your traffic came from and if the customer converted. It provides the convenience of having data from all of your campaigns stored on one place. Clickmeter is free for business with under 1,000 clicks/month.
3. Linktrackr – Linktrackr’s no-nonsense approach makes it incredibly easy to figure how to get your conversion tracking up and running. The product is really geared to bloggers with affiliate ads but the link tracking code works across other platforms and marketing campaigns as well. The reporting isn’t as robust as in other tools but sometimes less is more! The Basic Package is $64/year for 1,000 links and 10,000 clicks.
4. Improvely – Improvely help measure all of your campaigns, from a variety of platforms, in a single dashboard. You also get organic tracking as well. The platform is really strong click fraud detection and affiliate marketing campaigns and has the benefit of reviewing data all in one place. Improvely is available for $29/month on sites tracking 10,000 clicks or less.
5. Spring Metrics – Spring Metrics focuses on the online retailer and divide their offerings into separate groups: SmartConversion (includes social, content monitoring and coupons in the conversion mix) and Conversion Tracking (e-commerce tracking). Both provide reporting tools and allow you to measure across your site. Pricing depends on selection of services and volume of traffic.

Dedicate an hour to learning more about conversion tracking, test out a few of the platforms and select the one that’s right for you. Once you start measuring, you’ll be on your way to the end result…improving conversion!

Categories: SEO How to, SMB Marketing Tips