by Melissa J Luther

Created on: March 07, 2009   Last Updated: April 09, 2009

Most webmasters care about traffic from organic search but often forget that the ultimate goal is conversions. Marketers focus on pay per click (PPC) campaigns and track those conversions obsessively, but they forget the organic search conversions. This difference may be because they consider "conversion" to be synonymous with "sale," which it is not. A conversion is any action that a marketer wishes the prospective customer to take.

Of course the ultimate goal is the sale, but often this requires intermediate conversions first, before the prospective customer will take that final step. Organic conversions tend to be of this alternate type. They may be newsletter signups, downloads of a white paper or free software giveaway, or even a partial progression through a shopping cart. Most marketers consider these things unimportant and so discount them. In reality, the traffic-to-conversion ratio is a good measure of a website's health.

But how to track organic conversions? It's really very similar to tracking PPC or website traffic. Most website analytics programs can segment out organic traffic and where it went. The choice of program is up to the webmaster, but the type and size of the site should be taken into account. The free analytics programs are fine for smaller sites that get only a moderate amount of traffic, but don't do quite as good a job with large, ecommerce-heavy sites that get heavy traffic. It is worth investing in a paid analytics package for a larger, traffic-heavy site.

To ensure that the analytics program can recognize the difference between PPC and organic search traffic, PPC landing pages should be noindex,' to avoid them showing up in organic results. PPC landing pages in organic results can compromise the data for both the PPC campaign and the organic search conversions. Alternatively, tell the analytics program to ignore any traffic to PPC landing pages when reporting on organic search.

Regardless of the analytics package used, the marketer must set up goal-oriented funnels through which a prospective customer must pass in order to be considered a conversion. The "goal" is the final page of the funnel and is typically a thank-you page or purchase confirmation (although it may also be a file download page). The funnel may be only one page or several, and the marketer can decide whether the customer must pass through all the pages or if arriving at the goal through alternate means is still considered a conversion.

The exact details on setting up funnels and goals will be different for each analytics package, so always read the help pages to ensure the process is properly set up. It is also a good idea to run a test conversion (go through all the steps of the funnel, to the goal page) to ensure everything is working properly.

A website can, and should, have several conversion goals. Likewise, a single visitor can achieve one or more conversions. Tracking everything that happens on a website is critical to determining how well a website is performing its ultimate task: making money for the website owner.

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