That moment when an online shopper fills their shopping cart and clicks buy is the moment when a digital marketer sighs with relief. A conversion is the one simple KPI (key performance indicator) that lets a marketing team know that the hours of planning, strategy, and promotion behind the campaigns that took months to build are actually starting to pay off. However, we tend to get wrapped up in the thrill of watching conversion rates spike in our analytics data and forget to think about the baby steps that occur before our shopper makes that final purchase.
Generating conversions is a lot like pursuing a relationship, and as we all know, relationships require hard work. Think about the first time you fell in love with a product, chances are you didn’t jump right to the website and commit. You probably perused their social media sites, visited the website, read a blog post, subscribed to a newsletter, etc. before you decided to take the next step in the relationship and convert. Understanding the value of these smaller steps in the process is vital to an increase in your ultimate goal—the commitment called a conversion.
Before you start to build your marketing strategy, take a step back and assign a value to each of these tiny conversion building blocks, whether it’s an actual dollar amount, a cost, or business benefit. This will help you have a better understanding of which KPIs are the most important to track in order to meet your specific business goals.
Website Conversions
- Form fill
- Resource download
- Time spent on a specific page
- Pages views per visit
- Completed video view
- Time on site
- Webinar registration
- Clicks on a specific link on-site
- Blog view
- Blog comment
- Subscription to an RSS feed
- Clicks to trigger a live chat with a customer service representative
Social Media Conversions
- Page like or follow
- Post comment/reply/mention
- Post click
- Photo view
- Post like/favorite
- Post share/retweet
- Website referrals from social site
- Native video view (How many views your video has received within Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram)
E-mail Conversions
- E-mail newsletter subscription
- E-mail open
- Website referral
Why stop at one conversion? Keep that irreplaceable feeling flowing by outlining your business goals, determining which conversion steps are the most important, and nurturing your leads every step along the path to conversion city.