How to track conversions on your website.

Decide what counts

For a service business it is usually a submitted enquiry form or a tapped phone number. For a shop it is a completed order. For a booking business it is a confirmed appointment.

It should be something that leads to money. Newsletter signups and PDF downloads are worth measuring, but counting them alongside enquiries produces a number that means nothing.

Do not forget the phone

For most local businesses more enquiries arrive by phone than by form, and a tapped tel: link is trackable. Sites that only count form submissions routinely under-report their own performance by a wide margin.

That matters when deciding which pages work, because a page producing calls and no forms looks like a failure until you count both.

The mistakes that inflate the number

Each of these makes performance look better than it is.

• • Counting a thank-you page that is reachable directly, or that reloads.
• • Counting your own test submissions, which is easy to forget after a redesign.
• • Counting several unrelated actions as one conversion.
• • Counting a click on a phone number on desktop, where it usually does nothing.

Check it against reality

Once a month, compare the number your site reports against the enquiries you actually received. If they disagree, believe the enquiries.

A conversion figure nobody has checked against the real world tends to drift upward, because broken tracking usually over-counts rather than under-counts.