As a marketer, your goal is to help move customers through the sales funnel to drive conversions and ultimately create loyal, repeat customers. Partnering with influencers is a great way for brands to drive more conversions, but you have to know how to track conversions effectively to make sure your influencer campaigns are providing the...
As a marketer, your goal is to help move customers through the sales funnel to drive conversions and ultimately create loyal, repeat customers. Partnering with influencers is a great way for brands to drive more conversions, but you have to know how to track conversions effectively to make sure your influencer campaigns are providing the ROI you need.
If conversions are one of your key performance indicators (KPI), you have to know what you need to track so you’re accurately measuring your results. First, you have to figure out what a conversion means for you. Then, you can decide if you need to optimize to improve your conversion rate.
What is a conversion?
A conversion can be any action you want a potential customer to take, from clicking a button to filling out a form to making a purchase. There can be different goals throughout different stages in the funnel. Look at your own customer journey and map out what steps you want your potential customers to take at each step.
If a customer is in the awareness stage, you may want them to watch a video or read a specific article. If they’re at the consideration stage, you might want them to sign up for a demo or talk to a sales rep. Each step will likely have its own conversion rate, so you’ll want to track each one individually.
Looking at conversions and your conversion rate can help determine the success or failure of a campaign or tactic. Tracking conversions helps you identify how your funnel is working and whether there are any issues along the customer journey. For example, if people are abandoning your website without clicking a button or filling out a form, then you may need to optimize your website or improve the user experience.
From swipe-up to checkout
You want to look at every phase of the customer journey when you’re measuring conversion rates to see where you might be losing potential customers. If a customer clicks an ad or link on social media, what does their pathway to a sale look like? It’ll be different from channel to channel, but can help you find gaps in the funnel that are preventing your customers from converting.
When you’re working with influencers, there are several different ways to track conversions, like promo codes and affiliate links. But, those are only one part of the equation. Once a potential consumer clicks a link or swipe up on Instagram, what happens next? This is where you can identify potential issues within the customer funnel.
Is your website user-friendly? If you have a high level of traffic to your site but people aren’t going further, it might not be. Once they land on your site from an ad or from social media, is it clear how they find the product they want or is the experience confusing? When it’s time to check out, is the checkout and payment process easy to use? Answering these questions can help you optimize your customer journey and make sure your campaigns are effective.
It’s important to get your conversion metrics as accurate as possible, but there will always be some quirks you have to keep in mind. For influencer marketing programs, many brands choose to use affiliate links or unique promo codes that their influencers can share with their audience.
Promo codes and affiliate links are a good way to track clicks that take a person to your website, but a click on one of the links or using a code isn’t necessarily a guarantee of a sale. A customer may click on the affiliate link and then leave the page and return later to the main website without an affiliate link. They may also decide to make a purchase from their preferred retailer instead of from your site directly. Or they might click on a link to a product and decide they aren’t interested.
Ultimately, looking at the pathway your customers go through will help you track whether they are completing the conversions you set goals around. If the conversions aren’t happening, you can figure out where your customers are falling out of the funnel and why they aren’t converting. Once you know that, you can decide if you need to switch tactics, improve the user experience, or streamline your payment process.
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