How Effective Reporting Maximizes Conversions on Your Website

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Any experienced dental lab marketer knows: reporting is crucial to digital marketing success. Without it, you simply don't know which of your efforts was successful and the famous statement that "half of my advertising money is wasted, but I don't know which half" remains true.

Of course, reporting is crucial for inbound marketing as well. In fact, we'd argue that, if possible, it's even more crucial than other digital efforts. That's because effective reporting can maximize conversions on your website. In fact, here are three reports you can use your reports for conversion optimization.

1) Google Analytics Sources

Google Analytics should be a centerpiece in your reporting efforts. The search engine's internal solution allows you to track almost everything on your website, from the time spent on individual pages and incoming backlinks all the way to where your visitors come from.

That last part is where we want to focus on for the purposes on this post. You can use Google URL Builder to create unique URLs for each of your individual initiatives, allowing you to know exactly which of your efforts bring in visitors.

But you can go even further: set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics, and you can go beyond visits to analyze which of your visit sources drive the most conversion. Armed with this information, you can optimize your efforts and budget to focus on the sources that drive the most conversions.

2) Individual Channel Reports

Google Analytics offers you a big picture view of your digital marketing efforts. But of course, you are likely running several campaigns within the individual channels, from Facebook to Email, all aiming to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. To make sure your efforts within these channels are optimized for conversions, you should run regular reports for each channel.

Fortunately, that undertaking is easier than it sounds. Most social media networks now offer their own internal reporting tools, from Facebook Insights to Twitter Analytics, which allow you to delve into your individual efforts to see what works. For email marketing, you should always track open and click-through rates, as well as trends (such as send times and dates) that might affect these rates.

3) Sales Tracking

Finally, as you know, visit-to-lead conversion should never be your end goal. Converting your leads into customers is at least as, if not even more important to make sure your inbound marketing efforts are successful. Sales tracking enables you to make sure your leads are always on the right track to becoming customers.

For example, you could create a sales pipeline that enables you to follow your leads through the funnel. Setting up individual milestones like 'first meeting' and 'proposal,' allows you to assign likelihood metrics that the lead will turn into a customer to each step necessary for that conversion. As a result, you can closely track where each of your leads stand in the funnel, and how much it still takes to turn them into customers.

Reporting is a crucial tool in the box of any digital marketer. When optimizing your digital efforts for conversion, especially as a small business, you need to be sure that all of your efforts and budget are optimized to achieve that one goal. Fortunately, Google Analytics, individual channel reports, and sales tracking enable you to ensure just that, helping your business achieve lasting digital success.

How are you tracking your inbound marketing efforts and conversion optimization? Do you need help, or are you still looking for tools that help optimize your email marketing or sales tracking? In that case, contact us. We'd love to help your dental lab integrate an effective system that gets your conversion optimization on the right track.

Visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099 for more information.