Conversion tracking is a major part of a successful online marketing campaign. Tracking lets you know how effective your website and sales funnel are at persuading visitors to take a desired action.
With this information, you can do a lot.
Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Tool
Let's say you have a form on your Wordpress site that sends users to a 'Thank You' page after they fill it out, which isn't linked to from anywhere else on your site. The only way they can reach this page is by filling out the form. By placing AdWords conversion tracking on that page, you can see exactly which keywords people searched for who ended up clicking on your ad and filling out your form.
From here on out, anyone who fills out the form is counted as a successful lead conversion by AdWords, allowing you to go into your reports and see what keywords are creating value for your business. You then can take a number of actions: up your cost-per-click bid on keywords that are converting, create SEO campaigns around those keywords, build out additional products/services around those keywords, etc.
You can see how powerful this is.
Wordpress is my favorite content management system (CMS) for building websites. It's free, easy, and you can get up and running very fast. I'll get more into why I love Wordpress in a later post, but for now, let's take the above example and assume you have a form on a Wordpress site that you'd like to start tracking with Google Conversion Tracking.
Seems simple enough, right? Just copy and paste Google's conversion tracking code onto the 'Thank You' Wordpress page. But there's a problem -- Google's tracking code is written in a language called Javascript, and Wordpress doesn't like it when you place Javascript inside pages.
However, Javascript plays fine with Wordpress when you place it within the template files themselves. For example, you can place any type of Javascript code at the bottom of your theme's footer.php and everything will work great.
But when it comes to conversion tracking, we can't just put the code in the footer because it would be loaded with every page on your site and count a visit to any page as a conversion.
I outline two solutions below. The first is the preferred method, with an alternative method to follow.
Preferred method: Create a custom Wordpress page template for your 'Thank You' page that includes the tracking code.
Here are the steps:
1. Using an FTP client, log-in to where your Wordpress site is hosted. Navigate to /wp-content/themes/yourtheme, with 'yourtheme' being the name of the active theme on your site.
2. Download page.php and open it in your favorite HTML editor. Then, place this code at the very top of the page:
<?php
/*
Template Name: Thanks
*/
?>
3. At the bottom of the page, paste your Google Conversion Tracking code right before this tag:
4. Save the file as thanks.php and using your FTP client, upload it to your /wp-content/themes/yourtheme/ folder.
5. Log in to your Wordpress admin panel and Edit the 'Thank You' page. On the right-hand side of this screen, under Attributes you should now see a Template drop-down box. Click the box and select Thanks.
6. Click Update Page and you're done!
Alternative method: Create a copy of your 'Thank You' page and save it as it's own PHP file with Google's conversion tracking code placed at the bottom of it.
Here are the steps:
1. Navigate to your site's 'Thank You' page in your web browser and select View Source Code. (In Internet Explorer, click View > Source from the drop-down menu. In Firefox, click View > Page Source).
2. Copy and paste all of the source code to a new file in your favorite HTML editor. You can do this by right-clicking anywhere in the source code and clicking Select All, then right-clicking again and clicking Copy.
3. Within your HTML editor, paste your page's source code. Then, paste the Google Conversion Tracking Code at the bottom, right above
</body>
4. Save the file as thank-you.php.
5. Connect to your website with your favorite FTP client and upload the file to your website's root directory. (Note: your root directory is most likely the first folder that your FTP client takes you to when you connect. If you see another folder named wp-content, you are in the right directory.)
6. Test your page and make sure it loads and all of your links work correctly by going to http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you.php.
7. Set your form's 'Thank You' page to point to http://www.yoursite.com/thank-you.php.
You're done! This will work with both Google AdWords and Google Analytics conversion tracking. If you have any questions, please post them in the comments.
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I'm an internet marketing consultant / geek living in Manhattan Beach, California. I also grill a mean steak. Have an online marketing question? Contact me.
