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What is Conversion Tracking?
Conversion tracking is part of web tracking, but it can mean different things in different situations. To put it simply: a “conversion” is any meaningful action completed by a visitor on a website or, in your case, a ticket shop. The classic example is buying a ticket, but other actions, like pre-registering for an event, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a file can also be called a conversion.
The goal of conversion tracking is to monitor conversions, so you know which channel they came from (Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc.). This gives you valuable insights to help optimize your marketing campaigns.
An example: showing which channels are generating the most revenue (click for full size).
What Are the Benefits of Conversion Tracking?
Now that you better understand conversion tracking, you’re probably thinking: "What's in it for me?" We have listed the most important benefits below:
1. Improving Your Marketing Campaigns
Even the most experienced marketers still have difficulty predicting whether a particular marketing campaign will work. That’s why it’s essential to experiment with multiple elements such as images, colors, text, and more. Conversion tracking shows you which of your campaigns are more successful based on their conversion rates, most clicks, most revenue, or any other important metric. Based on that, you can make strategic adjustments and improve your campaigns.
2. Determining Your Return on Investment
Getting the maximum return on your investment is always a priority for marketing teams. But what’s the use of tracking revenue if you don’t know where it’s coming from? Without conversion tracking information, you won't know which of your online channels or campaigns are generating the revenue, or what your return on investment (ROI) is.
3. Allocating Your Budget More Effectively
Marketing campaigns are a major investment, so you want to ensure you get the most out of them. If you know what your ROI per campaign is, you can optimize and allocate your budget more effectively. Through trial and error, you must also take risks to discover which campaigns fall short, and which ones are a real hit. Conversion tracking helps you eliminate some of the uncertainty, so you can make financial decisions based on actual data and ultimately lower your costs.
4. Optimizing the Buying Experience
When it comes to optimizing the buying experience, you’ll want to use web tracking in general and not just conversion tracking (but don't worry, we’ve got you covered for this too, as we’ll explain below). Web tracking gives you valuable insights into customer behavior in your ticket shop itself, such as traffic or clicks (add to cart, begin check out, etc.). It helps you spot conversion killers that you may have overlooked. These obstacles keep your customers from converting, like an unnecessary extra step, payment methods that don't match the buyer's preferred method, or asking for too much contact information.
All of these benefits contribute to your end goal: to sell out your event quickly and ensure a strong turnout for your event. The key is properly allocating your budget, designing successful marketing campaigns, and optimizing your ticket shop. As a result, you can expect more revenue to invest in future events (or spend on a well-deserved holiday).
Getting Started in Your Ticket Shop
If you’re new to conversion tracking, it helps to start with the basics. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free web analytics tool that provides you with in-depth insight into your website, including conversion tracking and other valuable information (including the number of website visits, how much time people spend on a specific page, and insights into your visitors such as gender, age, location and more). Before getting started with our event ticketing platform, it’s essential to create a GA4 account (lucky for us, Google made a step-by-step guide on how to do this).
Where to find your Measurement ID (click for full size).
Done? Great! To give you the perfect kickstart, we created a direct integration for GA4. What do we mean by that? Well, where other ticket providers expect you to install everything yourself, with CM.com, all you need to do is copy-paste your GA4 Measurement ID into the settings of our ticket shop (event ticketing, so not for seated ticketing yet).
Just copy-paste to the settings (click for full size).
After you've done this, all important “events” that occur on your website will automatically appear in your Google Analytics. You may be thinking, "Events? I'm the event organizer, right?" Yes, you are! So, to be clear: within the context of Google Analytics, “events” refer to any interactions a user performs on your webpage.
Some of the events we automatically create for you in Google Analytics are:
Add to Cart (when users add a ticket or additional product to their shopping cart)
Remove from Cart (when users remove a ticket or other product from their shopping cart)
Begin Checkout (when users arrive at the checkout page)
Checkout Progress (when users add a voucher/discount code)
Set Checkout Option (when users select a payment method)
Purchase (when users make a successful payment)
We also support eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics with these events. This lets you see actual results per product (different tickets, or other products such as tokens, shuttle bus tickets, merchandise, and more).
These events will automatically show up (click for full size).
Our integration with GA4 saves you the hassle of programming code on your ticket shop. This makes you less dependent on developers, who are probably not your cheapest employees (if you are lucky enough to have found one of these rare species).
You may already be familiar with Google Tag Manager and wondering whether you still need it besides GA4 (if not, skip this paragraph). With our event ticketing software, there’s no need to use Google Tag Manager. This means you don't have to create a container or generate tag codes for anything you want to track. This saves you a lot of headaches. However, if you're an eCommerce veteran and missing certain events in our "standard" package, you can still add them through Google Tag Manager (and don't forget to hit us up with your feedback).
Beyond Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most used software for all websites—and for a good reason. However, it's not without limitations. Privacy regulations and tech giants like Apple enforce cookie blocking with their new software. This makes accurate conversion tracking increasingly difficult. Methods that used to work, such as cookies and tracking pixels, have become less reliable. So, the data you see in Google Analytics is often not 100% accurate.
As tech companies face growing pressure to block web tracking, marketers face new challenges. The good news is that there are solutions and new ways to perform effective web tracking. The bad news is that it's becoming increasingly complex (and expensive). We are following these developments closely, so you don't have to, and we are committed to optimizing our ticketing software so that you can get the best conversion tracking with the least effort.
Getting Started with Meta Conversion API
An example of this is the Meta Conversion API. It connects your ticket shop directly to your Meta Ad account. If you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, and a user clicks on your ad and buys a ticket, our server sends the conversion data to the Meta Ad Platform. This is 100% accurate because it cannot be blocked by browsers, adblockers, etc.
To get started with this, you do need a Meta Pixel first. This is a piece of code that you place in your ticket shop. Don't worry, we've already done most of the work, you just need to copy your pixel into the ticketing platform. From here, the pixel identifies visitors to your website and starts monitoring those same people on the Meta app itself. This allows you to optimize the results of your campaigns in multiple ways:
Remarketing - This involves showing ads to people you know who have interacted with your website and/or social media.
Look-a-like audience - because of the meta pixel, you know who has visited your website. With this available data, Meta can also target other users who look like them.
Measure conversions - you get more insight into the effectiveness of your meta ads and people's actions on your website. Based on this, you can make decisions that ensure your campaign is mainly shown to people who convert faster
To get you started, we've created a How-to Guide to Online Marketing. Curious? Check it out here!
