If you don't have proper tracking in your online shop, you shouldn't be surprised if the conversion rates aren't quite as desired.
With proper tracking, not only do new optimization ideas come, but you enter a new world and get to know your shop better again. There are so many reasons why you shouldn't be doing anything other than adding tracking to your store right now.
More on this today with Jörg Dennis Krüger, the master of tracking and hacking.
TRANSCRIPTION OF THIS EPISODE OF THE PODCAST
Yes, hello, my name is Jörg Dennis Krüger, and as my bean counter at reception said:
Yes, I am the Conversion Hacker.
And in this edition of the Conversion Hacking Podcast I want to talk about the most important thing when it comes to conversion optimization. Namely the conversion and measuring the conversion and the conversion rate and everything that goes into it so that we have a basis to somehow optimize our shop.
Because actually (and I'm always massively shocked), tracking, web analysis and so on are still completely underestimated. How I wrote my book “Conversion Boosting with Website Testing”, (2011, well over ten years ago), I distributed the first ten pages beforehand to do some advertising. And the first ten pages are very much about tracking.
My boss at the time, Norman Nötzold from Quisma, read through it and saw my examples where I wrote about people having the wrong numbers and not having proper tracking and so on. Then he looked at me and asked, “Dennis, is that really true?” Are there people who don't have proper tracking numbers who somehow trust the wrong tools? That’s not realistic at all.”
And yes, it would be great if that weren't realistic. In most projects it's just the case that we first have to clean up our tracking data because customers come around the corner with completely incorrect data. And why do I say that? Just today I had the case again. A new customer comes along and says he has a conversion rate of almost 10 percent. In this case I could almost believe him because it was really just a single-page shop, a landing page, and then the check-out. If the traffic is good, we can get a conversion rate of 10 percent. I know this from our Conversion X-Ray, which also has a conversion rate roughly like this.
But then I look at the data at home and notice that there is nothing about a 10 percent conversion rate in this person's shop. The data was simply viewed in the completely wrong place and not all visitors were included. This 10 percent is the checkout rate of those who have already put something in their shopping cart and then ultimately buy it. And then the rate is pretty bad, the 10 percent checkout rate should be significantly higher.
Then you look, okay, how do you measure that? And I notice that Google Analytics isn't really set up here, and the landing page isn't there either, because they're different systems. You notice that the conversion tracking doesn't really work anyway, it's somehow so difficult to integrate, etc.
So hey, you do online advertising, you want to make thousands, tens of thousands in sales a month, and then you don't even have your tracking under control. Sorry, that's really the last thing! And then there is no Google Analytics four on the site, but Universal Analytics, although that isn't even set up correctly. And that's really what it's all about for me, because the numbers, the data are the absolute most important thing for us to understand what's going on on our website. Everything else is like on the highway, at 180 km/h in thick fog. You can just orientate yourself a little, but it's extremely dangerous, and you only know afterwards whether something will actually come of it or just a big accident.
In any case, the risk is extremely high that it won't work at all because you don't know what to do. And yes, that's why I can only say again and again, "Setting up the tracking properly is the absolute first step".
In every roadmap I give, the first thing I always do is: check tracking, set up tracking so that we really know what kind of data we have. And so that we know that our data is being tracked correctly, that nothing is somehow attributed to PayPal and so on. And oh, so many other things that you have to set up in web analysis, and then you really have a proper view of the data.
Without proper data, I can't even see my change. It's particularly bad that I put work into the shop and then can't quantify what that work has achieved. And that’s exactly why we need proper tracking data. And if I now have a Shopify shop, for example, it's super easy to set up proper conversion tracking. If I have a WooCommerce shop, it's actually even easier and much better to set up proper tracking. Okay, I have to buy a plug-in for that, but then the whole thing runs like clockwork, and the same applies to all other systems.
Actually, Google Analytics is so easy to get into everywhere, and even for Matomo, if that's really what it's supposed to be, there's excellent support in most systems, and I can then track very well there. And then I can make decisions and then I can really ensure that my shop develops in the right direction.
And the coolest thing is actually that once you have properly set up tracking, the shop operator is completely surprised that you can see so much at once. This recently happened in a call where I set up Google Analytics Four properly and the customer was so surprised that he could see which products were put in the shopping cart and which of them were purchased. And in the end it really only took a few clicks to get the plugin running in WooCommerce.
It's not complicated at all to throw Universal and GA4 into tracking in parallel. The customer was suddenly in a whole new world. He recognized his shop again and began to understand it. And then, of course, completely new optimization ideas come, because then I can really see and analyze which products are visited, which products are added to the shopping cart, and which products are purchased. And I can also see where something is broken off.
And Google Analytics 4 in particular offers us so many new options (yes, you have to get used to the operation, I realize) that work really well and where you can then extract an incredible amount of information. As much as I'm sorry, Google Analytics is somehow still the gold standard for web analytics. Everything else is either not so good technically that it simply isn't tracked enough, or it's difficult to integrate, or the reporting is just super bad.
I don't want to name any names, but even large commercial systems have real problems being operable. That's why, even if data protection is medium, with GA4 better than with Universal Analytics, I would always rely on Google Analytics. But tracking isn’t just Google Analytics. Of course, I also have to make sure that my Meter and TikTok tracking work properly, that my Google tracking is really set up so that I collect as much data as possible in Google Ads and so on. Everything is then data, and I can make so many decisions and do so many things right through data.
So homework for you: now check Google Analytics, now check your tracking, and if you don't track everything properly, then set it up properly now! Not tomorrow, not the day after, now when you listen to this podcast! Because the big problem is that what we don't track is gone. We can't track anything afterwards, we can't change anything afterwards, even in the configuration so that we see the data differently.
So we need to make sure as quickly as possible that our data is correct and as clean as possible in Google Analytics and all systems, otherwise we simply don't have this data. And that's why we have to start tracking properly as early as possible so that we really have all the data and can then work with the data. If you put it off, there's really no way to help you because, as mentioned before, it's flying blind. Blind on the highway, in the fog, always keeping your foot on the gas. In other words, throw a lot of money at Facebook and so on, put a lot of work into the shop, but have absolutely no idea whether there might be a heavy truck in front of us that we're about to crash into, and then it's over.
Harsh example, but that's how it is. So here we go. Take care of your tracking. Now! Yes, and as I said, I would like five stars from Spotify, Apple, where you can rate me like that, and if you have any questions, if you need more input and so on, then just send an email to jdk@jdk.de or comment on this post on our website jdk.de/podcast.
Just step on the gas! E-commerce, so great, and with tracking and a lot more conversion hacking it's even more fun.
See you soon! Yours, Jörg Dennis Krüger!