As online conversions are becoming more and more prevalent it is important to maintain process and a plan for your online presence.  The way to calculate ROI and other conversion metrics is with analytics.

The Best Practices model used for analytics can be broken into seven steps which are listed below.

1. Identify Conversion Goals & KPIs

There are two types of indicators to monitor traffic and conversion.

Traffic monitoring is the practice of recording every person on every page regardless of source, relationship or authentication.  Typically a tag of source code is placed into a global footer of a website so that every page includes the tag.  Once the tagging is implemented you can review the traffic using a dashboard provided by the analytics tool which will report on information about the traffic like how long was the average customer on your site and where they went.

Conversion tracking is different than traffic tracking in that you will want to define a goal and track that independently of the traffic monitoring.  An example of this may be that you have a landing page used for an email campaign or perhaps a confirmation page after an ecommerce transaction.

Conversion tracking is very powerful because you can include values used in your application in the reporting dashboards.  Typically for an ecommerce site the itemized receipt values would be important to track so those values can be used to populate the dashboard and then your reporting will include sales data in the summaries.

Every site and organization has its own unique set of goals and these goals may change rapidly as data is collected and tuning is performed. (more…)