Tracking users across the web is a crucial aspect of digital marketing. Many websites run ads and invest significant amounts of money without proper tracking, leading to inefficient ad spending. Understanding user behavior, such as their actions after entering your website, how many leave without scrolling, and the exact point at which they exit, is essential for maximizing conversion potential and getting the most value from ads.
Evolving Tracking Systems in Digital Marketing
Tracking systems have evolved significantly over the past one to two years, with platforms updating their systems annually. For example, Google Analytics has changed its tracking system, and Shopify has implemented major updates. Every platform continuously enhances its tracking capabilities, as effective tracking is crucial for business success. In this AI-driven era, many platforms are integrating artificial intelligence to upgrade their features further.
Who Should Learn User Tracking Strategies:
User tracking is a technical and psychological approach that many digital marketers or businesses do not fully understand. As a result, they often run numerous ads without proper tracking, wasting their money. Here’s who needs to learn about tracking:
Facebook and Google Ads Runners:
Anyone running ads on Facebook or Google should learn how to track users on a website to achieve the maximum conversion rate. Mastering user tracking can significantly enhance your digital marketing skills and improve your chances of securing a better job position.
Performance Marketers:
Performance marketing is one of the highest-paying jobs in digital marketing, and user tracking is its foundation. The more you learn about tracking, the more your skills will improve, leading to better results in your clients’ website conversion rates.
Small Business Owners:
For small business owners, it’s important to understand user tracking since they may not have the resources to hire a high-skilled marketing team. Business owners need to know why their conversion rates are not improving or why, despite high traffic, they are not achieving a satisfactory amount of sales.
When I audit businesses struggling to gain clients or make sales, I often find that ad runners mistakenly mark page views as conversions. As a result, the conversion rate appears to increase, but users are not actually converting into customers.
How to Track Website Traffic Across the Web: Tools to Track Users:
There are many tools available to track a website’s traffic, including how much traffic it receives monthly, the bounce rate, where the majority of traffic originates, and peak visitor times. Google Analytics is the most popular tool used to track users across the web.
Google Analytics:
Google Analytics is the most widely used and powerful user-tracking tool for websites. It offers numerous parameters to help track users.
In the Exploration section, you can track the user’s funnel exploration, providing a detailed user journey in a chart format to analyze what users are doing after entering your website. This section can be customized to track customer data, such as when they first visit the site, when they start a session and the percentage of the page they view.
Path Exploration Template:
You can also use the Path Exploration template to track the paths users take after visiting your site. You can view how many users started a session, the number of users who have scrolled through a page and clicked on a link, and how many started another session. It provides a clear path of user behaviors on your site.
Here are some examples of what you can analyze using Path Exploration:
- Analyze the Top Viewed Page on Your Home Page: After landing on the website’s home page, it’s important to track which post or page most users choose to view next. When a user arrives at the home page, it can be counted as a session start event. By analyzing the event that follows the session start, we can identify which page most users choose to view.
- This analysis helps uncover where users may be getting stuck and where most of them end their journey. By understanding this, you can determine which pages need upgrading to increase engagement.
- Tracking what influences users to take action can also be valuable. By identifying which pages perform well, you can apply the same techniques to other pages to boost user engagement.
Segment Overlap:
In the Segment Overlap section, you can view a graph showing how many segments overlap. The intersection of your users’ behavioral patterns will help you analyze the behavior of your website visitors. Reports generated from this section allow you to:
- Specify particular segments, such as mobile traffic, desktop traffic, paid traffic, direct traffic, etc., and analyze their behavior. Break down data into separate parts for better analysis.
- Identify which segment has a higher conversion rate and focus on those segments to increase overall website conversions.
There are numerous templates available in Google Analytics that detail user behavior on your website. These insights can help you improve user engagement across your site.
Meta Pixel tracking
Meta Pixel tracking is one of the most popular platforms for tracking Meta ad results and user behavior. It is a piece of code that we attach to our website to track users’ activities and remarket to them. It helps measure audience details and analyze their behavior.
By using Meta Pixel on a website, you can create different events and mark a button as a conversion event. You can retarget audiences who have clicked on a specific button. Service-based industries, manufacturing businesses, B2B businesses, e-commerce businesses, and D2C businesses all use Meta Pixel for their social media marketing and achieve excellent returns.
Using Facebook Pixel, you can create a Custom Audience (users who have already interacted with your website) or a Lookalike Audience (people similar to your custom audience).
Similarweb Overview for Website Traffic Tracking
Similarweb is one of the best tools for checking website traffic without installing code, like Google Analytics. It provides detailed website traffic insights once you enter a URL—whether it’s your website, a competitor’s site, or even major web platforms and mobile applications (Android and iOS).
This is a powerful tool for digital marketing, enabling you to track users across the web. With Similarweb, you can easily view how other websites rank, including websites similar to yours. It shows key parameters like global rank, country rank, and category rank. Here are some of the parameters it can track:
- Opening Year: The year the company or website was created.
- Total Visits: The number of visitors to a website per month.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who leave the website without taking any action.
- Pages per Visit: The number of pages a user views before leaving the website, which indicates how engaging the website is.
- Average View Duration: The average time a user spends on the website.
- Category Rank: The website’s rank in a specific category within a particular country, displayed in a graph.
- Country Rank: The website’s rank within its country, shows whether it has increased or decreased over time.
- Global Rank: The website’s global rank, indicates its performance on a global scale over time.
- Similar Ranked Websites: On the left side of the rank graph, you can view a list of similarly ranked websites, which provides insight into your website’s competition.
- Traffic and Engagement in the Last 3 Months: A bar diagram shows the website’s monthly traffic, helping you gauge whether traffic is increasing and by how much.
- Compare Two Websites: You can compare two websites, which is useful for analyzing competitors and tracking their monthly growth.
Although Similarweb offers a free version, to access its full features, you would need to upgrade to the paid version.
For better data accessibility and continuity, it’s important to have clear knowledge of basic user tracking topics. Here are some essential topics to learn to maximize the effectiveness of user tracking.
Google Ads Dynamic Remarketing Tag
Dynamic remarketing is crucial for websites focused on boosting e-commerce sales and lead generation. Surprisingly, almost 8 out of 10 accounts are unaware of the dynamic remarketing tag feature, and even many agencies overlook it.
When users visit a website, many leave without completing a purchase or abandon items in their cart. To re-engage these potential customers, businesses can use dynamic remarketing to remind them about the products they showed interest in. This strategy increases the chances of converting those potential customers since they have already demonstrated interest in your products.
Explain the difference between standard remarketing and dynamic remarketing in Google Ads
Standard Remarketing: In standard remarketing, ads are shown to a set of users according to predefined criteria. All users in the group see the same ads, regardless of their interests.
Dynamic Remarketing: In dynamic remarketing, ads are customized based on a user’s behavior and interests. Different users see ads that are relevant to the specific products or services they viewed on your website.
Example of Dynamic Remarketing:
If a website receives 100 visitors, 20 of whom convert into customers while 80 show interest but do not complete their purchase, you can remarket to those 80 users.
You can set up an ad to show all 80 users an offer on a product that might attract them. However, since each user has their own preferences, only 20 users out of the 80 may like the product in the ad, while the remaining 60 may not. With dynamic remarketing, you can show 80 personalized ads, each tailored to the products that the users have already shown interest in on your website. This increases the chances of conversion.
Dynamic remarketing helps you identify which products your non-converting users are already interested in. You can retarget them with ads for the same products, offering discounts or creating urgency, encouraging them to make an immediate purchase.
How to run dynamic remarketing on Google Ads:
To run dynamic remarketing, you need to ensure that the dynamic remarketing tag is functioning correctly on your website. Go to the “Audience Manager” option in Google Ads, then navigate to “Your data sources” where you will find the Google Ads Tag. Check the details to verify if the e-commerce product ID is firing correctly. If it’s firing at a rate of 20-30%, it means your dynamic remarketing is working properly.
Data Layer in Google Tag Manager:
Google Tag Manager is a 100% free tool that provides an easy way to integrate and manage tags across multiple platforms from one place. Through Tag Manager, you can connect your website to Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Pinterest Ads, Snapchat Ads, TikTok Ads, and many other platforms to track user behavior easily. The data layer simplifies the stages of sharing data, making it important for maintaining data consistency.
Explain the data layer for tracking users on a website
A data layer is a code script, commonly developed by developers, that creates a layer on the website to track user engagement data. Not every website uses a data layer, but enabling one is beneficial for tracking detailed user engagement data.
How the data layer helps with data accessibility
Sometimes, JavaScript or CSS codes fail to collect the necessary data due to complexity, and in such cases, the data layer assists with tracking. Developers create a data layer to track specific data points, improving data accessibility and ensuring that essential tracking information is captured.
How does the data layer help with data consistency?
By creating a data layer in custom JavaScript, various data points like e-commerce information (SKUs, shipping costs, taxes, etc.), page hierarchies, and page categories can be tracked. This data consistently passes through the data layer, even when CSS or JavaScript fails to transmit the data to the tag manager.
You can create data layers for WooCommerce websites, Shopify websites, custom-coded websites, and other web platforms.
Conversion API on Facebook Ads:
A large number of ads are run daily on the Meta platform for product promotion, and Meta has extensive user data about interests, demographics, and more. This data helps Meta to show your ads to the right people.
For Android devices, it is relatively easy to collect user data, but Apple devices have privacy settings that allow users to control whether they share their data and activity. Many users now choose not to share their activity, which means Facebook Pixel, a data tracking tool, is unable to track those users’ data.
The Conversion API is designed to track data from devices that Facebook Pixel alone cannot track. When a person views your content, visits your website, creates a checkout, makes a purchase, or performs any activity on an Apple device where they have chosen not to share their data, Facebook Pixel cannot track it.
As a business owner or digital marketer, you need to track every detail of users who visit your website. The Conversion API allows you to set up Facebook Pixel to help track this data effectively.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) Server-Side
Typically, when you have a website and link it to GTM, GTM connects with Google Analytics. Once Google Analytics is activated, it starts to track user behavior on the website. For example, whenever a visitor comes to a page, Google Analytics tracks their activity, and whenever a visitor clicks on something, GA tracks that as well. Google Analytics then sends this data directly to the Google Analytics server. This process, where analytics tools send user data directly to the provider’s server (in this case, Google), is known as client-side tracking and is the most common method used by most websites.
Server-side tagging, however, is a different concept.
In server-side tagging, you need to connect your website with Google Tag Manager (GTM) and then activate Google Analytics using it. Instead of sending data directly to the provider (Google, in this case), you send the data to a cloud instance where a server-side Google Tag Manager is set up.
In this setup, you still have the client-side component, but the key difference is that data is sent to your cloud server first. From the cloud server, you then choose to send data to providers such as Google Analytics, Facebook, or other platforms.
How GTM Server-Side Tagging Helps and Its Benefits
Server-side tagging provides several benefits:
Reduces Page Loading Speed: It is crucial for website SEO. When you use various codes from platforms like Meta Pixel, Google Analytics, and others, and install multiple JavaScript tags on your website, it can slow down page loading speed. Server-side tagging helps mitigate this issue by managing tracking and analytics on the server side, thus improving page performance.
Enhanced Data Control: Server-side tagging allows you to control and limit which data is shared with providers. Direct code installations from platforms can collect additional data that you might not be aware of. With server-side tagging, you have more control over the data being shared.
Reduces Risk of Data Leaks: By limiting the data shared with ad platforms, server-side tagging helps protect personally identifiable information (PII). This is particularly important for larger companies that need to safeguard user data and ensure privacy.
Supports Complex Use Cases: Server-side tagging is useful for more complex tracking and data management cases, with better flexibility and precision in how data is handled and working.
Overall, server-side tagging improves website performance, enhances data control, and reduces the risk of data leaks, making it a valuable tool for managing user tracking and analytics.
Mistakes That Businesses Make in Digital Marketing That Do Not Attract Users Across the Web
Avoiding an Effective Sales System
Businesses often start running ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, or others, expecting immediate leads and sales boosts. They overlook the importance of properly testing lead generation forms, landing pages, email marketing strategies, and other crucial elements that attract users.
For instance, a travel agency or any business selling high-ticket items might mistakenly believe that simply running ads will convert interested individuals into clients instantly. In reality, a well-defined strategy is needed to guide interested customers through the purchasing process.
Neglecting Market Research
The second mistake is that many D2C brand owners fail to conduct proper market research. They may believe their product is helpful and solves problems, but without conducting surveys or market research, they may be mistaken. Product-market fit is crucial for running a successful D2C brand. Promoting a product that does not fit the market will not yield results through digital marketing. If digital marketers target the best demographics and interested users but see no engagement, it indicates that the product may not fit the market.
For businesses promoting products that already have a good market fit, digital marketers can effectively scale up sales with targeted marketing. However, if a product is newly launched and does not yet have significant sales, it is essential first to determine whether the product is a good market fit before expecting substantial customer attraction through ads. It is also the digital marketer’s responsibility to develop a strategy for analyzing product-market fit.
Not Adjusting Campaign Budgets at the Right Time
The third mistake is not increasing the campaign budget at the right time. Competition is growing daily, so you need to analyze your competitors: how they promote their products, how much they spend on ads, and how their pricing compares to the quality of their offerings. This analysis will help you optimize your services to stay competitive and capture the market before others do.
If businesses fail to adjust their budgets, avoid being reactive to market changes, and do not invest appropriately, they risk losing the opportunity to reach their maximum potential customers, allowing competitors to take their place. This will also impact ROI.
In digital marketing, it’s crucial to understand when to scale up your business and when to focus on market research or product-market fit, rather than only concentrating on scaling up.
Failing to Invest in the Ecosystem
The fourth mistake is avoiding investment in the overall ecosystem and believing that ads alone will suffice. Many business owners assume that investing in ads is all that is needed to generate clients or sales. However, it’s essential to also invest in improving various aspects of your business, including:
- Enhancing the landing page
- Building and training a sales team
- Refining copywriting
- Creating effective ad templates
- Producing customer review videos
- Optimizing website design, templates, and fonts for a better user experience
These upgrades are crucial for staying competitive and making long-term profitability.
Invest time in building a good user experience, earning customer trust, and developing a strong sales team, in addition to investing in ads. This holistic approach will help you create a sustainable business.
Competing Solely on Price
The fifth mistake is competing solely on price. Many businesses believe that lowering prices proves product-market fit and that customers always prefer cheaper products.
However, competing only on price is not a sustainable strategy. If a competitor with deeper pockets introduces a more affordable product, your customers may quickly switch to them.
This could force you to lower your prices to remain competitive, potentially leading to financial difficulties for your business.
Instead, focus on building a customer base that values quality over low prices. Develop a brand image centered on the quality and uniqueness of your products. While it may take time to establish such an image, emphasize the superior attributes of your products in your advertising, rather than highlighting them as the cheapest option.
This approach will gradually help you build a loyal, quality-focused customer base.
Not Providing Combo Offers
The sixth mistake is not providing combo offers. Offering deals such as free delivery on orders over a certain amount or discounts for purchasing multiple products can significantly boost sales. Customers are more likely to buy more items if they receive a discount or added value. This strategy helps increase the average cart size per customer, leading to greater cash flow and revenue.
As a digital marketer, I recommend that all businesses, whether working with an agency or managing an in-house team, avoid these six mistakes to reach their maximum growth potential.