Conversion tracking, it just makes sense

Imagine you owned an ice cream franchise and you had just acquired a new store location in Sandton City. You spend millions of rands on store fittings, security systems, branding, lighting, advertising etc. and after a couple of months you are all set to open the doors and start selling ice cream to your customers.

Now, if you didn't have conversion tracking your scenario would look something like this:

You open the doors on the first day of the month and then you leave the store, unattended and open 24/7. At the end of the month you come back to your store and suddenly realise that you have no idea who came into your store, you don't know what ice cream your customers liked or dis-liked or what they bought, which days and times were most popular and have you have no idea how much return on investment (ROI) you made.

This sounds crazy, right? Sadly though, this is what so many brands do - they spend thousands of rands on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) every month, yet they have no clue what their ROI (Return On Investment) is.

Now take that same scenario but this time you have conversion tracking in place. You will now be able to know who entered your store on a daily basis, what ice cream was most popular, which days and times were the busiest and how much ROI you made on every purchase. You will also learn what improvements in the store should be made in order to increase sales.

Based on this you would think that conversion tracking would be an easy concept to get brands to buy into and start implementing... I'm afraid not. Many brands either don't know how to effectively implement the code or they fear that the tracking code will cause security risks. A lot of brands are quite happy to spend millions each year without a clue whether all the traffic generated resulted in any sales or not.

I know if I had an ice cream shop (or any shop for that matter) I would definitely be using conversion tracking... It just makes sense.