Traffic across the internet is down, according to many sources. But, some websites, ours included, are finding that conversions are increasing. This seems to run against the traditional SEO-first model that many marketing agencies have touted for over a decade: longtail keywords → increased traffic → increased conversions → more clients.
During my marketing data reviews, I started to notice a trend. LaFleur wasn’t getting as much traffic as we used to, but this didn’t result in fewer conversions. If anything, business has been up. I started to reconsider how I analyzed our agency’s data.
Then Wil Reynolds, one of the most respected, data-driven marketers out there, confirmed my suspicions. His site’s traffic was also down—but their conversions weren’t dropping, either.
People’s search habits are changing. AI overviews are cutting into longtail keyword traffic. Google Business Profiles are becoming a source of truth. And increasingly, when consumers visit your site, they’ve already done their research and are ready to convert.
In our marketing glossary, we state that a conversion occurs “when a user takes a desired action, such as completing a purchase or signing on as a client.”
It’s important to track the metrics that directly tie to business growth. When LaFleur talks about conversions broadly, we mean signed clients. After all, clients pay the bills—not clicks.
A lead may be a good first step, but leads don’t guarantee revenue. They are a precursor metric and worth tracking, but a lead alone is not a marketing win. A signed client, on the other hand, is a clear indicator of marketing success. This difference in focus can make or break the way you view your data and optimize your campaigns.
For many of our clients, we track KPIs (key performance indicators) like:
The focus is on whether we’re getting the right leads, at the right price, and turning them into clients for the firm or business.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of data noise out there—and a lot of metrics are only tangentially related to your return on investment. If you don’t have a transparent, data-literate marketing partner, your conversion metrics might be so broad that you can’t evaluate lead quality.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an area where you might be used to talking about conversion rates. But it’s important to understand how your agency partners define those conversions.
You should review which conversion actions are set up. Some agencies inflate their results by counting irrelevant actions—like page views or clicks—as conversions. However, these don’t contribute to actual business outcomes.
By reviewing your PPC conversion settings, you can ensure that only the most relevant actions—such as form submissions or demo requests—are counted as conversions. This helps you debunk misleading marketing claims and focus on the metrics that really matter.
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Now that you know what conversion metrics really matter to your bottom line, let’s talk about a couple that aren’t as helpful.
Many businesses assume that a user spending a lot of time on a webpage is a good thing. But time on page doesn’t necessarily indicate that the visitor is progressing through your lead funnel.
For example, a user might spend five minutes on a blog post but never take the next step to engage with your company. Alternatively, another visitor might spend just 30 seconds on a landing page, fill out a form, and become a qualified lead. In both scenarios, time on page is not a reliable indicator of success.
Understanding the job to be done (JTBD) for each page is crucial. A blog post’s goal might be to engage and educate, while a landing page’s job is to convert visitors into leads. Tailor your goals and metrics to match the purpose of each page.
Why time on page can be misleading
While form submissions are a valuable conversion action, the way GA4 (Google Analytics 4) tracks these events can lead to overreporting. Through our own experience, we’ve found that the number of form submissions GA4 reports is often inflated due to double or even triple counting.
For instance, a user might hit the “submit” button multiple times, refresh the page, or take other actions that cause GA4 to count the form submission more than once. This creates misleading data that inflates your conversion numbers, giving you a false sense of how many potential leads have actually completed a form.
The solution? Custom form tracking
To combat this overreporting issue, we recommend setting up custom tracking for your form fills. Building your own metrics ensures you’re only counting actual form completions—eliminating any inflation caused by multiple event firings.
When setting up conversion tracking in GA4, pay attention to your website key events. (Google recently renamed its GA4 conversions “key events.”)
Google Analytics often sets up automated events, such as scroll depth or page views, that may not align with your goals. These automated events can inflate your reports and give you a skewed sense of success.
To avoid overreporting, customize your key events to focus on actions that genuinely reflect user intent. Form submissions, demo requests, and product purchases are all valuable actions that should be tracked and reported accurately. Avoid relying on Google’s automated events unless they directly support your business objectives.
RELATED: What is data-driven marketing?
While “goals” and “conversions” are often used interchangeably, they represent different things. Goals are subjective and can vary depending on your objectives for a particular page or campaign. For example, a goal might be to increase the average time on a page to three minutes. However, that doesn’t necessarily lead to conversions or new business.
On the other hand, conversions are concrete actions that lead to business outcomes, such as a form submission, a demo request, or signing a new client. While goals are useful for tracking user engagement, it’s the conversions that ultimately drive revenue.
Whether it’s paid search ads, social media campaigns, or your organic website traffic, tracking conversion rates helps you understand how well each platform is performing.
For paid media, your key metrics should include conversion rate and cost per conversion. This tells you how much you’re spending to acquire a client and how effectively your ad spend is converting potential leads into real clients.
With organic channels, like search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing, the metrics are more complex. You’ll want to analyze which landing pages or blog posts are driving the most meaningful actions, like form fills or demo requests, and how effectively they’re converting those leads into clients.
However, your marketing data doesn’t operate in siloes. You must track how your campaigns are performing across multiple platforms. A marketing analytics tool, like LaFleur Core Insights, can help you track the entire life of a lead. For example, you might discover that brand awareness campaigns on social media might be a powerful step in your client journey—even if the campaign itself doesn’t have a particularly high conversion rate on its own.
If you’re ready to get the most out of your marketing data and budget, you need to understand precisely how your website and marketing campaigns are converting. LaFleur can help you get this clarity—using our proprietary Core Insights dashboards and data-driven marketing strategies that look beyond “just” traffic to metrics that really matter.
Contact us today if you’d like to learn more or want to schedule a Core Insights demo.
References
Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents (2024, February 19). Gartner. Retrieved from https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-19-gartner-predicts-search-engine-volume-will-drop-25-percent-by-2026-due-to-ai-chatbots-and-other-virtual-agents
Reynolds, Wil. (2024, September 23). Why 2020’s SEO KPIs won’t work in 2024 in a GenAI & Data Scarce world. Seer Interactive. Retrieved from https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/why-2020s-seo-kpis-wont-work-in-2024-in-a-genai-data-scarce-world