What Matters? Clicks vs. Conversions
The following is excerpted from the Keyword Connects eBook: 5 Online Metrics That Matter for Home Improvement Lead Generation (and Five That Don’t). To download the full eBook, please go to www.keywordconnects.com.
Clicks have been around as an online metric since the dawn of the Web. They’re easy to track and we intuitively understand what they mean. “Someone clicked onto my web site.”
But just as visitors from outside your marketing territory are worthless, clicks for their own sake don’t matter either.
Clicks from India, for example, are not only not in your marketing territory, they probably aren’t even real. They are often automated “click-bots”, not real homeowners. You can spot this traffic when they stay on your Web site for a single second (literally.) It isn’t coming from a real person, let alone a home improvement prospect.
Yet, they register as clicks.
Not only are these random clicks meaningless, unscrupulous online marketing companies will do things to deliberately increase their volume. Just to make their campaigns appear to perform better.
What you want visiting your Web site are flesh-and-blood human beings. And so you need to move from “clicks in general” to “clicks that matter.”
Which clicks matter? Those that lead to conversions – or submitted web forms or emails. You can put those responses into your CRM tools, call those homeowners, and try to book appointments.
Here again, Google Analytics will help you pull back the covers. You can see where the clicks come from and you can distinguish click-bot traffic from real, local people who spend time on your Web site, and are interested in buying what you’re selling.
How? By looking at the time they spend on your Web site. Serious visitors will spend a minute or more on your Web site. They will also visit at least 2-3 pages while there, as they learn more about you and what you sell.
Not phantom visitors who land on your Web site and then immediately disappear.
Lead Gen Insight #3:
“Top line” click numbers can be misleading. Track the ones with the potential to convert.
