A practical checklist for conversion tracking

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. Run through this the next time conversion tracking comes up.

Data you do not trust is worse than no data, because it gets quoted anyway. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The checklist

• If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it
• Track the actions that map to revenue
• Test that the tracking fires before relying on it
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The short version

Measurement is only useful when someone has agreed in advance what they would do differently. Three things worth confirming about conversion tracking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Test that the tracking fires before relying on it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.