Turning a Guess into a Plan – Analytics & Conversion Tracking

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Sandra: Hi everyone, and welcome to yet another episode of Greyd Conversations. Today it’s all about tracking, analytics and conversions. We’re going to talk about why analytics matters so much, what and how to track. We’re going to talk a little bit about the challenges with attribution and privacy regulations. And of course we’re also going to take a look at Conversion Bridge’s new Greyd.Suite integration.
Because here with me today is Derek Ashauer, agency owner and longtime WordPress developer, as well as creator of several WordPress plugins, among others, Conversion Bridge, that recently released its new Greyd. Suite tracking integration. Welcome to the show! How are you today?

Derek: I’m doing wonderful. Thank you for having me on today.

Sandra: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. I already gave a short introduction, but please, take the time to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself. What you do. What’s your background?

Derek: Right. So I’ve been, making websites probably since early 2000. When I first got out of college and I jumped into WordPress fairly quickly starting in about 2007, 2008, when I started working freelance, for myself full timeStarted making a couple little, you know, plugins just for myself, my own little needs, over the years. But, and was doing mostly client work. But about 2 or 3 years ago, I finally decided to make the switch to be what I call product. First, meaning I focus on my products on a wake up first thing in the morning and then do my client stuff later in the afternoon. Because I really have enjoyed, working on products a lot more after doing clients for 15, 17 years, whatever it was, you know, it’s kind of time for a little bit of a change, although it’s still adjacent, still in the WordPress world, which I really love in the community and all that kind of stuff. But my day to day is definitely different, and, and I’m really enjoying that.

Sandra: So yeah, I can relate to that. So yeah, let’s, let’s directly dive into the, analytics and conversion tracking. I think, I read somewhere in your notes that it means turning a guess into a plan. It helps you show and understand what people are doing on your side where they drop off, what stress actual say is. So, starting in a very high level point of view, why would you say is analytics essential for any marketer, a website owner?

Derek: I mean, you you can’t stand behind every person as they visit your website to know what they’re doing on their analytics platforms are a tool to help you get a lot of that information. They’re not perfect, but they help you make a, give you a lot of good information about, you know, what do people do when they hit your website? Are they there for 10s and leave immediately? That tells you that your landing page isn’t doing its job. Do they visit 20 pages but then ultimately don’t do anything? Maybe there’s confusion about how to find your call to action, or how to find the thing you want them to do, whether that’s to fill out a form or make a purchase or sign up for our newsletter or something like that. So having some analytics can really help you improve and refine your website so that it can help grow your online presence and business over time. If you just don’t have any data, there’s I mean, you are literally guessing as to what is working and what is not working. So yeah, so that’s kind of one of the main reasons why we need to have some analytics on our sites.

Sandra: You already mentioned, there are platforms out there that actually a bunch of different platforms. So maybe could you give us a brief overview of what tools are out there? And even more importantly, how do I know which of these platforms is the right one for my business or my client’s business? Which which factors are relevant for making that decision?

Derek: Yeah, there’s always Google Analytics. That’s the obviously the first one that comes up for pretty much everyone. It’s been the de facto for so long. But because of the changes that they made for Google Analytics, for ad privacy concerns and things like that, over the last 5 to 7 years, there’s been a lot of alternatives that have come up and started to compete with Google Analytics. There’s great ones like plausible Pers, which is actually out of Germany. User maven, there’s I mean, for example, Conversion Bridge works with 18 different analytics, platforms. So that’s just and that’s not even all of them, not just the ones I’ve integrated with. There’s so many more options these days to choose from. Each ones has their pros and cons, but a lot of these alternatives are also privacy first analytics options.
That’s what pretty much every single alternative to Google Analytics is. There is their primary differentiator. Another thing is also what analytics. If you’re not actually looking or using your analytics, it is pointless to be tracking it for the most part. And a lot of people with Google Analytics Four find their dashboards to be overwhelmingly confusing, which I agree with.
It’s even someone like myself who’s been building websites and understanding and using analytics, you know, for a long time. When GA4 came out, it was just like, what? Where, how? I remember being able to, you know, add Google Analytics to a client site and then just say, hey, just go log in and take a look. I didn’t even have to provide any instructions.
By and large, nine out of ten clients could just look at it and go, yeah, that makes sense. That’s pretty simple. It’s straightforward. What this data is and what it represents. Nowadays I even I struggle and I’m in there almost every single day and I’m still like, wait, where was that thing? How do I find it? It’s a challenge.
And it is a very widely echoed sentiment, amongst most marketers. I mean, it’s one of those things once you get in there, there are a lot of power features, a lot of power tools that are available in there to build reports. But it’s something like if it’s your full time marketing job and you’ve spent a week or two just learning and training, then maybe you can start to sort it out, which in my opinion, that’s too much for a lot of like individual site owners.
That’s too much time, that’s too difficult. And if you’re not going to look at it or use it, then you there’s not really point, it’s not doing anything for you. So, some of the great alternatives, like I said, are out there and their dashboards are so much easier, to understand and interpret. It’s back to the good old days of kind of ga4 of how the data is laid out, your top pages, where your conversions are happening, you know, where your top referrers are coming from, simple things that make it clear and easy to get those top level data and analytics about what’s going on with your site to make some good, educateddecisions. One positive thing in Conversion Bridge. Actually, in the next release, I’m hoping to get it out this week is there’s actually going to be a Google Analytics dashboard, which basically takes your Google Analytics data and makes it look like the old, very simple, easy to digest organization right in your WordPress admin. there’s a demand for that.

Sandra: I can imagine

Derek: Yeah. Yeah. Anything to make Google Analytics, easier to interpret for you or even your clients, you know, because like, like I said before, I could send a client to Google Analytics, they sort it out pretty quickly. Well, now they can. And it’s also going to be in their WordPress admin as well. So then you have to log in to a separate spot.
It’ll all be there in one one cohesive area for them to log in and see. So yeah. So those are some of the options. So there’s some slight differences between each of the platforms. Some of them are a little bit better at maybe some, e-commerce level tracking where some are more simple and just page view and some really basic stuff.

But what’s great about Conversion Bridge is that you could actually enable 18 different analytics platforms all at once and try them all. You could do a week trial for each one of those and see which one works for you or your client. And there’s, there’s, you know, it’s there’s no code tracking or sorry, there’s no code snippets or how do I check this or that, whatever. It’s just toggle and to your site ID or you know, each one’s a little bit different, but general it’s copy and paste, one little tag or, you know, a unique ID number and you’re done. And then you’re tracking your form submissions button, clicks, page views, all that, you know, purchases. If you’re doing WooCommerce, other types things, simple set up and you’re out the door and you can see what you or your clients prefer to use.

Sandra: Yeah. And then also compare the…

Derek: exactly, you can compare compare them. Yeah.

Sandra: One thing that’s important, I think no matter which platform you’re using, as always, I think proper setup is very important. Are there common things that site owners very often get wrong when they implement analytics? Are there any common pitfalls that you can share with our listeners that they can avoid them?

Derek: Yeah, I think there is, you know, a lot oftentimes it’s recommended to just take that, you know, you set up Google Analytics, you copy the little tag that they give you and you paste it into like a header footers, you know, custom code snippet plug in and you say you’re done. It’s decent. It does the core literal bare minimum that you can do to set up analytics. There’s so many more things that you need to consider or could also take advantage of. Beyond just those simple just based tracking tags. Some of those things are also like cookie banners. Are you making sure that if you have a cookie banner on your site and you are, you make sure that that tracking follows and goes along with, the consent mode and all those other things. Other things are, you know, if, if you’re able to use something like Conversion Bridge, there’s things where it can for every time someone visited a say you had, a membership site and you wanted to understand what content is more popular amongst my gold members versus my silver members. Conversion Bridge can do this without any extra set up. It’s just a couple toggles. And what I do is for every time there’s a page view, it’ll say who’s the currently logged in visitor? Okay. They’re subscribed to the gold plan. Let’s tack that on along with the page view data, add some as some extra data, and so then you can sort your page views based on the type of person. And you can compare that. So you can say oh look my gold members tend to visit these topics more. My silver members tend to write, go to these types of topics and you can start to understand your audience better as to what is more attractive to them. And that allows you and guides you in what kind of content you should be producing, if you like.

We want more gold members because they pay more every month. Yeah, let’s start making more content that attracts and keeps those gold membership level users on our site. Stuff like that. So, you know, that’s something that you could do with a more complex setup with your analytics, where you would go beyond just the copy paste tag that you now add to your site

Sandra: But I also often see that a lot of thought does go into what to track and how to track, but then nobody ever works with the guide or data. So something like you mentioned before, and it’s something that tends to happen as well.

Derek: Yeah, I’ve noticed that for, you know, one of the things that when I started conversion, which I didn’t quite realize, but there is still a lot of education around it of like you said, what do I track? I don’t even know that I could do something like what I just described. I didn’t even know that was possible. Why would I want to do that? What’s the purpose? And stuff like that? So, you know, there is a lot of stuff you can get from your analytics platform besides just, oh, a lot of people visit the homepage and some people visited the about page.

Sandra: Exactly. So talking about what to track, I think one of the most relevant parts of website analytics is tracking conversions. There are different types of conversions. There are like bigger conversions, like a sale, but there are also micro conversion spikes, crawling a page, clicking somewhere, doing something on the site. What would you say? What’s the recommendation? What do I actually need to track? Do I always have to track like everything is at track? Everything. Is it enough to track like, the big conversions? How do I handle that?

Derek: Right. So, the more you can track, the better, in my opinion. It’s one of those things where you cannot go back in time and retrack people. So if you don’t have it set up today, you’re not going to be able to use it in a month from now. So the more you track the even if you don’t use it right now, maybe in six months you go, hey, I’m finally ready to sit down and go through this, but you can’t then say, I’m ready to sit down with this and go through it. If you never set it up,

Sandra: I’m probably not even know what you might need. Yeah. You know, you might need in the future.

Derek: Yeah. So the sooner you can do it, the better. But as far as what to track, obviously every site is going to be a little bit different. If you have a blog and you’re trying to get people to be engaged in that blog and maybe join your email newsletter, things like how many people sign up, you fill in your signup forms is what it is. That’s your main call to action. You don’t have an e-commerce store or anything like that. Your main conversion is people subscribing to your email newsletter. The next one is you talked about like maybe scrolling. You want to make sure that people actually scrolling and reading the whole page or time on page wouldn’t be another. That’s actually usually a default one, that most analytics platforms record. You know, if they do too much, it kind of keeps track of how long the average time people are on the page. But, but you maybe how long people, how far down people scroll on pages. Are they only hitting like, the top, you know, paragraph and then bailing? That could be a sign that maybe my ads on my blog are overwhelming, and I need to maybe tone that down so people actually read this and want to come back and ultimately subscribe. So there’s lots different things. If you’re maybe like an agency, you want to track your form submissions that’s, you know, form submissions and purchases are probably the two most obvious ones. So any site that even has contact, things, contact forms on the website always want to track those. And the so easy to set up, especially with something like Conversion Bridge.You might as well track every single form and whether you use it or you don’t, you know, at least you have it straight, right from the stretch.

Sandra: And probably not even just whether a form is submitted, but also if you, for example, have a multi-step form and which point in the form do people stop using it? Stop, prevent? What prevents them from submitting a form? For example?

Derek: Yeah, exactly. That could be something that could be really helpful as, on really complicated forms. And I also those like, say you have a specific landing page that’s really, really, really long. You want again, you want to see how long they scroll, how long they’re on the page, and various things like that. So there’s just there’s so many different things. It’s basically whatever you want the user to do. What you, what you think would be good for your site if the users took that action. Like I have a hair salon. One of the things is they have a third party. A hair salon is a client site. They have a third party, site where they, do all the, you know, booking and appointments and things like that and so on that site, the conversion, what we track is essentially the click any of the clicks that go to that booking page. So we actually track button clicks as the, as the main conversion on that site, because it’s on a third party site also and stuff, we can’t it’s harder to track the conversions into the analytics platform there. But so that’s basically what we track that you might even want to track which button on the page is the one that is driving people. Is it the one in the banner? Is it the one in the footer? Is it the one in my header in the upper right hand corner? What is actually leading people to get to that specific or get people to that page. So then you can learn maybe no one’s clicking that you know by now button in our upper right hand corner. Maybe it’s not clear. Maybe the wording is off, maybe it’s not highlighted enough. You can start to learn where to make some tweaks and changes over time to see which one can get more clicks, to your conversion page, let alone the actual conversion, submission. Like if you have a form, like a set or a buy now button type thing.

Sandra: So the more the better. One of on the other side, I could imagine that a lot of agencies or website owners are sometimes being overwhelmed by that much data that is available there, and they don’t really know how to interpret the data without getting lost and all the numbers and maybe they they fear on focusing on the wrong numbers and taking too much time focusing on stuff that’s probably not not relevant. So where do you find that balance?

Derek: Honestly, I think the what’s really helpful is the, the dashboard that you’re using. Like I said, with Google Analytics four right now, that dashboard is is basically wide open. And it asks you, what do you want to know? Or I don’t know, like you said, maybe I don’t know what I want to know, but some of the alternative platforms and the dashboard that the Google Analytics dashboard, that Conversion Bridge is now going to be adding, it simplifies it.There’s only like 5 or 6 key metrics that anyone that most people, I would say really need to know or, or if can truly wrap their head around without much explanation. And that can give them some good, detailed insights about what’s going on on their website. Like I said, here is traffic generally going up? Is traffic generally going down. That’s a pretty good one. You know, what’s the average time on the page? If the average time is only six seconds, there’s something wrong with the website. If people are bailing in six seconds, there’s something wrong, you know. So and what are your top pages? What are the most pages people frequently visit that helps you guide, you know, what type of information that content to people find most useful? And those, you know, when you have a dashboard that is more simplified, it makes it easier to get started once you wrap your head around those basics. And you. Okay, now I actually do want to get a little more. Actually, now that I understand this stuff, I want to start learning and poking and prodding. It’s kind of like, you know, when you’re building a WordPress website, maybe start with like a simple page builder and then you wait, I should want to do this customer thing, or maybe have to write a little bit of code, and then you realize I’ll actually really like code. And and then you start really getting into, you know, the, the nuance and the details and how to get into all those little things. And it’s same thing for analytics, like anything. And I’ll say this where I think one area that Google Analytics is killed it for beginner site owners is that that level is gone. It’s just disappear. So I hopefully conversion can make that easier for clients and site owners to get back into it and to start using it, because that was one of the things is I got a lot of feedback that from people like, well, I’m not really getting the value from conversion, which why is that? Well, I just don’t look at my data. I don’t show the data with Google Analytics and it’s just it’s overwhelming. I don’t know what to do with it. So that was the impetus behind that. No, I need to make this dashboard. I need to make it easier. So that everyone can have their data more accessible and easier to understand.

Sandra: Okay. Agreed. Let’s do one fun fact in between. Probably it’s a difficult one for you to answer. Based on the answers, if I already provided. So, if you could only track one metric for your business for the next six months, which metric would that be i?

Derek: Purchases Simple.

Sandra: Okay. Yeah. That’s it. But isn’t that one that you’re tracking automatically anyways because you’re seeing how many purchases you get?

Derek: But but if I’m doing it, my analytics or maybe my ad platforms, it’s by far my number one metric for anything is purchases. And then looking where those came from through the analytics platforms and things like that. I’m running ads. I want to make sure that I’m tracking the purchases. So the ad optimization is kicking into effect, because that they can optimize which ads are performing best based on which ones actually produce purchases, because that’s ultimately my end goal. So if I only had to track one purchases for my sites, for sure, and I imagine it’s going to be the same for anyone who sells anything selling. So that’s going to be the number one metric that,

Sandra: that kind of leads us to, the next topic, which is funnels. Tracking individual conversions is a great start, but it might not give you the full picture. The full picture requires to compare, conversions and several metrics along the funnels, or really follow the visitors path through a site to get an understanding of where you do’s and how you win. Leads. Can you tell us a bit more about why funnels are so important when it comes to analytics and tracking?

Derek: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, a lot of times a conversion doesn’t happen on a single page.It can maybe you have an ad that goes to a single landing page. There’s some information and there’s a form on the bottom or a buy now button, and they buy it right from that page and they and they go, but it may take a few more steps, than just that one single page. And maybe they, you know, if you have an e-commerce site, there’s a home page, then they visit the category page, they visit an individual product page. They add that to cart, begin checkout and then go through all the steps of checkout till they complete the purchase. If you have a set up funnel, where and then. One of the most common funnels is the e-commerce, funnel, which that is usually the, viewing a product or viewing a category. Adding to cart, begin checkout, purchase. If you set that up and you track that those specific steps and you notice that we get maybe 10,000 people who view a product, add to cart, but then never go any further. Maybe there’s a UI issue on your website, maybe it’s not clear once they hit Add to cart, there wasn’t a clear what do I do next? Where do I go? Where’s the view cart button? Is it kind of hidden? Is it disguise so it helps you understand? If you saw like, you know, a lot of people here at this step, a lot of people this step, and then nobody on that next step, it’s a clear indicator that there’s something wrong or a disconnect between those two steps and that there’s something for you to fix on your website in there. So, when you when you check all those steps in the funnel, it’s, it becomes pretty quick, pretty clear where a lot of people will drop off and where you can make some improvements to increase your overall ultimate conversion, whatever that may be.

Sandra: And I guess funnels. It’s important to remember that the funnel is not just what’s happening on the side.You mentioned, paid ads, for example. That funnel actually already starts in the ad platform, and there are conversions that are happening there, and then there are conversions that are happening on your site. And if you only look at numbers like individually and separately, you might end up, with putting a lot of money in a campaign that seems to perform great. Based on the conversions in the social media platform. But then you don’t get any usable leads from that on a website. So, I guess, how do I actually handle this? I guess it’s, it’s the best solution would be to to connect the website and the platform somehow to each other or to to somehow send analytics data from the website back to the platform.

Derek: Yeah, the ad platforms. I really like this topic because, one of my favorite examples is so you have two ads and you have two ads, one ad gets 100 clicks and results in five sales. You get another ad that gets 20 clicks but results in ten sales. Obviously, it’s, you know, you would think that that first ad wasn’t as good because it didn’t get as many clicks. If you only looked at the clicked data, you would think that first ad was way better. It got so many more people to click on it. But if you weren’t tracking the conversions of the actual purchase of what should what you ultimately want that user to do, because just clicking to the ad is not the goal, it’s to make a purchase
If you’re not tracking those purchases back to the ad platform, the ad platform is going to be great. We want to keep you. We want to make money. Let’s keep rolling out this ad that has all the clicks. That’s getting all the clicks. But for you as a business, it’s not doing anything. It’s not. It’s not actually getting you more customers. It’s not nearly as successful for you as a business owner as maybe the other one, because you might be drawing the wrong type of people to your website. More looky loos or people are just in the research phase, as opposed to the people who are in the purchase space are ready to actually make a purchase. Another example I really like is say you had, you know, you had, two ads, similar thing, two ads, The each got ten different. They got ten purchases each 100 clicks, ten purchases you got. Oh, these things are identical. But if you actually looked even further, if you identified all these people for the first ad, only spent $5 on every purchase. And these people in this ad spent $200 on every purchase, there’s actually a clear winner. So you need to even go beyond just tracking the purchase, which oftentimes ad platforms are like copy and paste this tracking code on your site. Well, it doesn’t it doesn’t include what was purchased and how much it was paid. How much was paid for it. Yeah. So not on that. Yeah. So so you can really start to learn what exactly makes you the most money. Not necessarily gets you the most clicks, not even the most purchases. For me, it’s what keeps me the most money. That’s my end goal is high, you know, high order, average order value, things like that. And so you can learn that with that level of conversion, which conversion rates helps you do without any code snippets on this app? That’s just it tracks every purchase. What was included in the purchase, what the order total was, whatever the ad platform can accept, it will send it that data and

Sandra: That’s that’s super relevant for that. And it also really depends on what kind of a product you have, how long the sales cycles are, for example. So when we started promoting Greyd.Suite as a product, we started with, having ads on Facebook and Instagram, and they seemed to convert great. So that, the goal was not to, to sell directly, but to create leads that we would then put into our automation and the sales funnel. And for a while, it looked like these ads were performing really great. They were coming a lot of leads. Are there a way more leads compared to to other, marketing and, ad things that we were doing, but over a long period of time, we then compared the leads that we were getting from this platform that seemed to be performing great, and compared these to the other leads from the other platforms. That way, way it were way fewer in numbers. But we then found, for example, that the leads we got, for example, through organic LinkedIn, were fewer, but those were the ones actually converting in turning into sales a couple of months after. Whereas, Facebook and Instagram leads, we had a lot of them and the ads performed great, but those were much less likely to become a customer. And if they became a customer, then they were just like, let’s add small subscriptions or even just single licenses. So it’s really important to to like take a look at the data, look at the entire funnel from the generation to sales or whatever conversions you’re looking at. And also compare that over time and not just doing yet. I think that’s what.

Derek: Yeah, absolutely.

Sandra: But, there’s a button and there’s a couple of things that, from my perspective, make it quite difficult nowadays to to do exactly that. Because in the past attribution was pretty straightforward. Tools could use, could track users across websites, devices and session sessions by simply using cookies. And today, attribution has become much harder because of growing privacy protection, resulting in often way fewer data that you can work with. And I’ve had heard many complaints that today’s privacy rules make accurate analytics more or less impossible. So I guess you have probably a different idea or a different take on that. So what are your thoughts on that?

Derek: I would say it makes 100% accurate analytics impossible. Yes. We’re never going to get 100% perfection and track every single user. And get perfect attribution on every single ad click. That’s just how do you think that was true ten years ago? Yeah, it was just about say yes. Yeah. So it’s never going to be that perfect. It is harder. It is more challenging. One of the ways that ad platforms have helped advertisers get around that is something everyone has their own unique name for it, and Google Ads is called enhanced Conversions. It’s a term that I’ve adopted in just what I call for everything, but basically what the idea is to say you’re on Facebook, you’re logged into your account. I’m logged in as, you know, Derek. And then I click on an ad and I go to a web page. I look at that looks cool, but I don’t actually buy. I later go back, I say I’m doing it on my phone by now, you know, later I’m going to go on my desktop. This is something I actually want to buy on my computer instead of doing it from my phone. For whatever reason. I go on there, I make the purchase, and then, and that gets sent back to meta as a conversion. But they go, well, I mean, we couldn’t really we don’t really know who this came from. I mean, that’s cool, but we don’t really know, you know, if this came from anything. But the reality is, is that we can one of those is from enhanced conversions because basically we do some meta or Facebook. Meta knows the email address, knows my email address. When I clicked on that ad, what we can do is then if they made a purchase with WooCommerce, submitted a form with grade forms or whatever, they include email address in there, send that back to meta to be like, hey, it can be. It gets sent securely, hashed all the, you know, all the security privacy stuff. So it’s it’s sending it as a hash and securely goes back. They compare and they go, oh yeah, we see that this user actually did click an ad at some point back, back three days ago. We will attribute that click to that conversion. So that’s one way that ad platforms have helped advertisers, increase their, attribution with things, is things like that. And so you can pass things like email address, first and last names. And the more data obviously you pass, the the more accurate it can be in that attribution on that ad platform side. And, and that’s again something that Conversion Bridge does and something that just a simple cut and paste code snippet is not going to do for you. Conversion Bridge knows the form plugin, knows where how to look for the email address. It helps you set that up to connect. This is the email address you want to use. Is that when you sent it in? Does all the sends all that over to the to the ad platform for the enhanced attribution. And then make sure that your ads are performing as optimally as possible, and you’re not wasting money on ads that don’t actually convert.

Sandra: What about conversion APIs? Is this more or less the same and just a different name, or is this another matter?

Derek: Right. So the conversion APIs is a server to server connection. What the default things like is you think like a Facebook pixel, TikTok pixel, things like that. That’s all done with JavaScript. JavaScript loads on the page. You put a little, some JavaScript, some additional say, hey, you know, like meta track this conversion. Here’s some data in a line of JavaScript. There are, conversion APIs which allow to do it from a server to a server connection, which helps get around ad blockers and browsers and things like that. Conversion, which does have a couple, conversion APIs with Facebook. And I think the other one is TikTok. I should I should really remember that, sometimes I don’t even remember all my own features, but there’s a couple. There are some that do work with the conversion APIs to further, improve that attribution and what to actually do. It’ll send both the pixel tracking and the and the conversion API tracking both so that it can do that. And it has methods to prevent what’s called deduplication. So it sends a unique ID, whether that’s like the order number as a you know as a transaction ID.
So say you know okay, we received it twice. So I really don’t need to count that twice. Or if it’s like a form submission that it there’s a way conversion has a way to uniquely identify that both of those are the same. So when it ends up at the ad platform, it goes, okay, well, only track will only count one of those. We don’t need to count two of them. But it does have some of those, conversion APIs to also help, with, with some of those, more accurate tracking.

Sandra: Okay. We already talked a lot in, in general. You already mentioned some of the features of, Conversion Bridge. So, I’m curious to, to learn a little bit more about how it happened that you, developed a tracking technique for WordPress
So did you feel that, there was just no tool out there yet offering these these features? Is your tool doing things differently than than others? What? Tell us a little bit more about what conversion bits can do and how it works.

Derek: Right. So one of the main impetus for me to create Conversion Bridge was wanting to not use Google Analytics. Actually, my, you know, my very first alpha versions, I specifically chose not to include a Google Analytics option because I was like, I want this to be for all the alternative platforms. So that was going to be my unique angle when 4 to 5 people first, you know, I sent it out, started talking to some people for the five. First people were like, works for Google Analytics. I’m like, all right, I guess I have to, so I so I did ultimately add, you know, Google Analytics before the version one ever launched. But that was one of my main reasons I wanted to use an alternative to Google Analytics for the very reasons I explained that I found Ga4 to be just so overly complex, so fraught with potential privacy issues. You know, saying some countries even saying it was illegal to use it in their country. I just was like, I just I want to go back to the good old days where it was a little more straightforward. And those privacy alternatives, are a, I would say a throwback to some of those easier to interpret and put on site. So that was one of my main reasons. But also another reason was, is that I as making sites for clients, I always I didn’t like having to go, okay, I’ve set a site here for a nonprofit. I’m using give WP. They have an add on that I have to buy that works with Google Analytics to track conversions. Okay, now I have this form plug in and they have their Google Analytics conversion tracking that I need to buy. And we’re also going to add we’re also using this other plug in for this other thing, which then also has its Google Analytics conversion tracking. And now they had to buy three separate plugins just to add conversion tracking for Google Analytics. Well, what the heck, maybe I should just custom code this myself, you know? And because I don’t want to buy this and pay $50 a year for each of these plug and and I was like, it just it didn’t make sense to me. So the other reason why is I wanted it to be a single plugin that would that is a many to many connections, so that you could use it for every single site and be part of your stack. So whether I am using Greyd Forms or maybe I’m using another form plugin or I’m using, you know, WooCommerce or I’m using easy digital downloads, or because every project has unique requirements. But I could always come back to one single plugin, regardless of what I’m working with, and know that I know how it I know how to install it. I already have a license for it. I don’t need to buy another one system and you know it works. I’m familiar with the settings how to set it up. I know to the developer one spot to go for support. You know, it’s it was just to me, it made a lot more sense to have a plugin that did that had that many to many setup. And so that’s also, you know, one of the goals. And again, like I also said, it works with 18 analytics platforms right now and growing I’m adding two more probably some you know, so so regardless I can use it whatever the project requires from a client or myself.

Sandra: Yeah, I think that makes it an interesting product, especially for, for agencies. And as we already mentioned, it now also has an integration for create suite. What to be up for a quick demo and show us what you can actually do and how it works?

Derek: Absolutely. So we have a Greyd Form: setting up conversion tracking on this is incredibly simple. Let’s hide some things. So all we have to do to enable conversion tracking as we go to the conversion tracking tab. And literally all it is, is toggle or to that’s basically all it is to set up general conversion tracking. This will go into all your analytics platforms. If you have there’s a couple ad platforms like Google Ads Linked in and X, which require like a unique ID. All you have to do takes about 20 30s to go in, grab that unique ID, and then you would just paste that here and then you’re done. But essentially that’s all you have to do to enable conversion tracking for, grade forms. If you wanted to do enhanced conversions, we have that down here. So you can see that we want to say, for example, we want to pass that email address. So we just need to select which which field we want. So we want to pass the email into our ad platform for that enhanced conversion to have more accurate tracking on there. As we discussed earlier in our conversation, let’s see if we go to pages and we go to Greyd.
What also, you know, as I talked about earlier, is that you maybe want to do button tracking as well. So in order to add conversion tracks, say we have a button here in grade grade has a custom button block. All we need to do is again all those you click on the button, there’s just a simple toggle and you’ve enabled conversion tracking. And it’ll go to every single analytics and ad platform that you’ve enabled in your Conversion Bridge settings. So that’s I mean, that’s literally how easy it is. There’s no code, no anything. One single toggle. Pretty pretty simple. And then if I were in here in the Conversion Bridge settings, if I, if I enabled, you know, say all these analytics platforms, you can see here, obviously I have a lot of testing that I do online. But you know, there’s 18 of them on there. I could enable every single one of these all at once. Yeah, all at once I do. I put on my Conversion Bridge website. I think I have five going right now just for my own testing and, and you know, my own, you know, writing blog posts and research and things like that. But also in development, it’s not uncommon for me to have ten different platforms to test them all, and I could enable all of those, and then it would track in every single one of those analytics platforms that I have enabled on this page. So like right now it would go to every single one of these, and I never had to write a single line of code or do anything in there.

Sandra: And that was super easy. So yeah. Great. Thank you.

Derek: Yeah. So some other things that it also does is if you are in forums and you go to entries, what we can do is you’ll see that in Conversion Bridges, a concept called a conversion journey. And what this does is Conversion Bridge actually has its own internal tracking as well. And so it’ll track the user from the very first page they visit all the way to every single page that they do and every type of conversion. So this is like a purchase conversion. You can see that they you know, did the begin checkout clicked on an elementary button? They clicked on the Greyd button, click here’s a grade form submission. Things like that. So you can then see what pages they went to, what they did, and all kinds of and what that journey looks like for this particular person. On your site.

Sandra: That’s super interesting. For example, also a sense you can use, one on the same form and have it on different, different pages, for example, and see where exactly, the submission happened. We talked about, since we talked a lot about privacy and also cookie banners. Do we do I just have to add, like the, the platforms where I send the data, to the cookie banner to add a Conversion Bridge to the cookie banner or how does that work?

Derek: Right. So you have, conversion, which does work with these five, cookie banners at the moment. Once you set it up and you just say which one you’re using and which one you’d like, which one you like it to integrate with, and then you can and then, conversion rates will automatically follow and respect, the user’s, consent and whatever they give through your cookie banner. Okay. But one very interesting thing is that not all the not all the platforms need to follow consent. For example, like plausible or fathom or purse. They do it with cookie lists tracking. So you don’t need so it doesn’t need to worry about a cookie banner. So that’s another huge advantage to some of the alternative platforms. In there it’s often mostly the ad platforms and things like that that do set cookies.

Sandra: Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Okay. Thank you very much for sharing that. Before we wrap up for today, I have to at least ask one I related questions. Yeah. So, in your opinion, what does the future of tracking look like? I mean, we talked a lot about the changes that have happened with all these privacy regulations in the past. So with the influence of AI, where do you think the journey is going?

Derek: And, I think it’ll be a lot more accessible. I think Google just released this. I think there’s 1 or 2 platforms that analytics platforms that have AI involved in theirs, but you can ask it, hey, how many people convert it who landed on the homepage and filled out my form? And you could just, in plain text, ask it for data. In my experience. Yeah, that’s still that’s still something that is not the best. It took a long time. I did in one of the alternative analytics platforms, and it took it like 60s to come up with the data. And I’m like, I feel like I could have just click this. Yeah, it took a long time to come up with it. I didn’t even have that much data in mind. You know, because this is a development site, you know, I only had very limited stuff and it just took a long time to do it. So, I’m, I’m, I think it’ll make some of that stuff a little bit more accessible. In my opinion, it’s also one of the things where when you have concrete structured data like analytics is it’s easier to just code up a specific report for what you want. And, and you can work with it. It doesn’t need to be so open ended like I needs to. So I don’t think it’ll have too much of an impact, honestly, other than maybe in that realm of, you know, cool factor of I can just ask my analytics some data. But, honestly, I would, personally, I’m maybe I’m a little old in that regard, but I would still I would still I’m still of the I would rather get like a report where I know a developer tested it and confirmed that it properly pulled data as to an AI that could, which I’ve seen it do many times just when I handed it. like a CSV file with only 100 rows and it’s still just added things up wrong. And I’m like, that wasn’t even all that much data. And you got and you can even add it up, right? So to trust it with tens of thousands of page views over, you know, a month or several months and to try and aggregate all that data
And so I, I’m like, I just it’s something that’s structured data. You could code something to specific people report. So that’s, that’s my take on it.

Sandra: I, I could see some potential in helping you understand the data that you’ve gathered already with, the platforms that you have. And we talked about being overwhelmed with that many numbers and not really knowing where to start. So I could imagine there’s a situation where I can tell the AI. So, look, this is all the data that I have. I’m trying to figure out just isn’t that what does the data actually tell me? Can can you help me find where to start? Probably that that might be, a good thing or probably help me, identify, the best, numbers in there that I can show my customer, for example, on my client.

Derek: Yeah, I, you know, that’s actually a great idea. So I think you could even, you know, maybe if you’re using, like, an alternative platform, like, say, plausible or something, you could screenshot your plausible dashboard, upload that to ChatGPT and say, give me some insights. Now what what do you what do you see here that maybe I’m not recognizing or understanding?
And then it could be like, okay, well, I notice and like you could ask it, what are some other, some what are some of them. What reports do you want to see that I could give you to help you give me some insights about my website. And another thing I also just thought of is also you could screenshot your homepage and say what? I’m looking at my home page. What do you think I should track? And it’ll quickly recognize. I see you have a by now button. You should track purchases. I see you have a couple call to action buttons and and things like that. That could be an interesting use case for AI as to either give it a URL or a screenshot of your home page, and say, based on this, what do you think I should be tracking. And then that can give you some tips and, and ideas of, of stuff to, to track now.

Sandra: Yeah. That’s also an interesting I think it’s a basically it might help you figuring out how to solve all these minor challenges that, that we’ve discussed today. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very, very much. That was very insightful. Super interesting topic. I think we could go on talking for hours. Is there anything that we haven’t covered today that you say that is super relevant? We have to mention that we can’t leave this episode without talking about that.

Derek: No, I think, I think we covered pretty much everything I can think of. So I think hopefully a lot of people find this insightful and helpful.

Sandra: I hope so too. And I, I really think that, so I found it super interesting and helpful. So definitely. So maybe let’s, let’s wrap up with, are there, let’s say 1 to 3, low effort, but high impact analytics actions that you would recommend our listeners to do?

Derek: One is add analytics to your website. There’s a lot of people that don’t have any. I’ve learned people that have been building websites for over a decade, and I go, hey, would you like to try out convert rich? Oh, I don’t even have analytics on my site. Really? You don’t. So just adding analytics to it, is is pretty low hanging effort. And then, you know, it’s everything we talked about with conversion rates, they’re all pretty low effort now at this point. So the segment buy Conversion Bridge and start tracking your purchases, your button clicks, your form submissions. And do that. And if you’re, another thing is I want to that I think, we probably have some agency people, listeners know this Greyd podcast, is, one thing I like to preach for agencies is your portfolio is better if you tell your prospective clients how you improved a website with real data. So instead of your portfolio just being pretty screenshots of designs you’ve made and what you did, but you also can say we increased purchases by 27%. We increased form submissions by 58%. That’s something that prospective clients are going to go, oh, that looks amazing. That’s important to me. How do you do that? Well, you sign a new client, you immediately install Conversion Bridge on the existing website.
It works with all the plugins, all the analytics platforms. So while you’re working on the new site, you start collecting data if they don’t already have it. And then in the month or 2 or 3 months, however long it takes you to build that website, you know, have have some data to compare to the next one, 2 or 3 months after with the new site.
And hopefully I’ve had this too, or sometimes I’ve brought it down. Unfortunately, you know, we’re not all perfect, but, but then you know what to improve and, you know, try and work on it, improve it from there. But then hopefully you have some great data that says as a result of our work, we increase the conversions and, and grew this business by some type, some type of percent.
And that will significantly increase the strength of your agency portfolio with that data.

Sandra: I think that’s a super helpful and interesting, tip because I can totally relate to that. Whenever you do customer case studies and want to show how your services or your product has helped your customers, it’s that the hardest part is always to get some metrics, to get some KPIs. And with this approach, you automatically have the comparison like what’s been before and what’s been offered, not just in terms of okay, page speed has gone up. This is something that you can, share really easily, but also in terms of the KPIs and the conversions that actually matter to the client. Like I said, from submissions, leads generated, purchases. And this like I say, it’s super easy to get the data from where we started. Then you create a new website for the customer and what us what is the result of that? So yeah, that’s a super I think that’s a great, great takeaway. For all our listeners out there, thank you so much, for taking the time, and having this great conversation.

For our listeners out there, if you haven’t already, please don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and, don’t miss the next episode. And, Derek, thank you very much for being here today and have a great day.

Derek: Thank you so much, Sandra.

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