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How to Increase Website Traffic: Direct, Search, Referral, and Social

If you don’t know where your visitors are coming from, how do you know where to focus your marketing efforts? Understanding your website traffic sources is the first step to increasing your website traffic.

Website traffic metrics can clue you in on how well your site is doing and how many people it is reaching.

Google Analytics is a popular solution for measuring such metrics and many webmasters check their Google Analytics dashboards on a daily basis in an attempt to gain actionable insights about visitors.

Specifically, Google Analytics’ web traffic source metric measures how many visitors come to your website from various channels.

Once you have a better understanding of how visitors find your site, you’ll have a better idea regarding what is working and where you may need to make improvements.

In general, more (relevant) visitors mean more opportunities, so it’s important to always be thinking about how to increase relevant website traffic.

In this post, we’ll look at how to increase website traffic by taking a step back and looking at the various traffic sources your visitors can come from.

Specifically, we’ll cover the following topics:

So…put on your darkest shades, because we’re about to shine a lot of light on the subject of increasing traffic to your website.

Sunglasses Emoji
Source: freepngimg.com

How to Increase Website Traffic

Before you can effectively increase website traffic, it’s important to spend some time understanding the various types of traffic sources.

Each indicates different types of users and behaviors. Depending on your needs, some sources may represent better fit prospects for your offers than others.

In terms of using a tool like Google Analytics, there are four main sources of traffic:

  • Direct traffic
  • Search traffic (paid and organic)
  • Referral traffic
  • Social traffic

Let’s dig into various strategies for increasing website traffic specific to each source.

#1: Direct Traffic

Direct traffic refers to the situations where your URL is being entered directly into users’ browsers. A high direct traffic metric indicates good brand recognition and customer loyalty.

Consider brands like Amazon, Google, Apple, or Facebook — most Internet users don’t need a search engine to access these sites.

If you don’t have a big brand name, you can still get direct traffic from effective marketing campaigns that focus on promoting your website.

A spike in direct traffic could be the result of a well-executed advertisement or event that includes references to your website URL.

For a great example of how a non-big brand name was able to generate direct traffic from a well-executed ad, check out the video below:

Typical direct traffic visitors include:

  • Returning visitors/customers
  • Visitors referred by word-of-mouth
  • Visitors that may have seen or interacted with offline campaigns

How to Increase Direct Traffic

Strategies to increase direct traffic focus on improving customer experience and retention.

First things first — simplify your site name for easy recall. Keep your site name as close to your brand name as possible (again, check out the video above to see how effective this is).

You want people to be able to easily recall it. Dot-com (.com) domains are preferable because they’re so widespread. If the dot-com version of your brand name is taken, choose another trustworthy extension.

Note that increasing direct traffic shouldn’t be your sole focus for increasing web traffic in general. But it’s worth spending some time here.

One way to do that is to improve your offline marketing efforts.

Some basic tactics to consider:

  • Having business cards made with your domain name and keeping them on hand.
  • Getting a booth at industry events with signage that features your domain name.
  • Sponsoring an organization that has connections to your customer base with promotional imagery that incorporates your domain name (in addition to your branding).

Before doing any direct marketing, it’s a good idea to make sure your website is ready to handle an influx of visitors.

Website performance (like page load time) is a major aspect of providing a great user experience.

Using a performance-boosting plugin like Hummingbird (90,000+ active installations) can help you to improve page speed and make Google happy (page speed is a named search ranking factor).

Hummingbird minification screen
Notice how dark Hummingbird’s shades are? That’s because this plugin’ll make your website run blindingly fast!

Hummingbird optimizes your website’s page speed, thanks to the minification, compression, and caching of your website files.

#2: Search Traffic

There are two types of search traffic: paid and organic.

Paid Search Traffic

When you pay for ads to appear in relevant search results, you generate paid search traffic. Paid ads let you target specific audiences, and because most operate on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, you only get charged when users click on your ads. Visitors that visit your site from a relevant ad can be considered to have a high purchase intent — good news from a conversions standpoint.

Unfortunately, competition for desirable keywords can make ads very expensive in some industries.

Also, the widespread use of ad blockers means there’s a lower chance that people will see your ad (which can mean wasted spend if you’re using a CPM (cost per thousand) model).

Google Paid Traffic Ads.
You can buy visibility for your website by paying for traffic…

Organic Search Traffic

Most of the Internet-using population makes daily use of search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and, as such, they are the best source of free, organic search traffic.

Organic search traffic is fairly high-quality amongst the various types of referral traffic. It’s comprised of users actively seeking out your site — their click-through is a vote of confidence that you have the answer to whatever they were searching for.

Of course, in order to rank high enough in relevant search to be really considered as an option, you’ll have to invest in SEO.

Organic search traffic results on Google.
… or increase traffic organically using SEO.

How to Increase Organic Traffic

Increasing organic traffic can be pretty straightforward if you have an SEO strategy in place.

Following SEO best practices includes making sure your website is regularly updated. All else equal, Google is more likely to rank content from websites that don’t sit dormant for extended periods of time.

A blog strategy (backed with relevant keyword research) can help — even if you can only justify posting new content once a month. Consistency is the key to success.

On a related note, make sure to cultivate a keyword research strategy. If you’re new to SEO, one of the most important foundational lessons is how to do keyword research for SEO.

For WordPress websites, plugins like SmartCrawl (30,000+ installations) can help ensure that you’re using keywords effectively.

SmartCrawl WordPress SEO plugin.
SmartCrawl helps boost your site’s SEO in places you didn’t even know you could boost SEO!

The SmartCrawl plugin gives you suggestions to optimize pages or posts based on a chosen focus keyword.

It also analyzes pages to remind you of optimization opportunities you may have forgotten about (like related internal links) and generates XML sitemaps so search engines can easily consume information about the URLs on your site.

While you’re at it, keep page load times quick. As mentioned, site speed is an important SEO ranking factor.

If you’ve got a picture-heavy site (a blog that makes use of featured images on every count), a plugin like Smush (1,000,000+ installations) can help.

Smush WordPress Optimization plugin.
Image-heavy sites benefit from using Smush compression to further reduce page-loading speed and attract more love and traffic from search engines and visitors…get the picture?

Smush is an award-winning plugin that compresses images — after backing up the original files — without any noticeable loss in quality.

Last but not least, keep your site secure. Website security matters for SEO. In fact, SEO is a primary reason for the majority of site hacks.

If hackers manage to place dubious links on your site, this can result in you being blacklisted by search engines. For WordPress sites, it’s a good idea to install and activate the best plugins to enhance your site’s security. We, of course, recommend using Defender combined with our secure managed hosting for your site.

Cartoon of DevMan and Hacker working on laptops.
Improving your site’s security will help to ensure that only good traffic gets through.

#3: Referral Traffic

Referral traffic comes from sources other than search engine results or direct marketing.

A lot of referral traffic indicates that other websites find your content relevant and valuable.

When multiple websites link to your site, search engines pick up on that. More referrals to your site mean it’s considered more trustworthy and reliable.

Some examples of possible sources of referral traffic include:

  • Guest blogs. This can take one of two (or both) forms: you may pitch posts to authority sites in your niche, or if your site is popular, you can solicit guest posts from others. By sharing content on other relevant industry websites, you’ll get exposure to new audiences (and website traffic).
  • Partner/sponsor websites. Whether you’re a brand or a blogger, both parties mutually benefit from mentions and links within partnerships.
  • Media coverage. Mentions on online magazines, newspapers, or press releases can be a great source of website traffic. This website traffic tactic can also have other positive implications for business thanks to the social proof that comes with a feature on a well-known industry publication.
  • Online reviews. Yelp, Google Reviews, and Angie’s List are just a few examples of online review sites that can drive relevant referral traffic to your website. Depending on your industry and niche, make sure that you also have a listing on industry-specific review sites (like Avvo for Lawyers). Then, use a listings management tool to make sure that your business information stays consistent across listings to help with local SEO.
  • Email newsletters. Referral traffic can take the form of people clicking on links from your own email list, or instances where your website link has been included on other organizations’ newsletters. You can set up link tracking (or make use of UTM codes) to determine if your email newsletters successfully drive website traffic.

How to Increase Referral Traffic

Increasing referral traffic often means proactively partnering up with sites from similar or related niches.

Other strategies to increase referral traffic include:

  • Focusing on creating high-quality content. Whether you want to improve SEO or increase referral traffic, the underlying tactic remains the same — high-quality content is worth investing in. Ultimately, you want people to find information on your site valuable enough to share. Otherwise, why bother creating it?
  • Writing catchy headlines.  Studies have found the majority of people share articles online based on the headline. If you’ve written a useful, well-researched article, there’s no shame in leveraging the power of clickbait headlines to get people to read it. Just make sure to follow through on satisfying the curiosity created by your headline once people click through to your website.
  • Building your email newsletter list. The best WordPress email marketing plugins can help with this! The HubSpot WordPress plugin (100,000+ active installations) can help you to implement marketing email automation, create opt-in forms, and track analytics to determine how effectively you’re converting visitors into followers and customers.
HubSpot WordPress plugin.
HubSpot WordPress plugin.

For more tips on increasing this type of traffic specifically, check out this guide to increasing referral web traffic.

#3: Social Traffic

Social traffic is really another form of referral traffic, however Google Analytics groups this type of website traffic under its own special heading.

As the name suggests, social traffic is traffic that comes from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social channels.

Unless you pay for advertising, social traffic is free — not accounting for the time you spend creating content or the cost to hire help to manage your channels.

Google does not directly consider the impact of social links in its search ranking algorithm, unlike referral posts from websites.

However, the traffic generated by social media is still important for achieving business goals — especially considering how much time the average user spends on their phone, scrolling through social networking sites.

Social Media Influencer
Influencers can drive social media traffic to your site…cool! (source: https://influence.co/miss_bellucci_meli)

How to Increase Social Traffic

The best way to increase social traffic is by increasing social media followers.

Start by increasing your Interactions with followers. Social media allows users to keep in touch with their favorite brands and businesses like never before. People are always looking for connection, so interact with your followers to gain insights regarding what your customers want — straight from the horse’s mouth — and effectively build customer loyalty (which increases the likelihood of direct traffic). Loyal customers will bring new followers (and customers) to you.

Next, make sure you’re posting — often. Social scheduling tools such as CoSchedule (10,000+ active installations) make it easy to keep your posting calendar full with relevant content.

Technically, CoSchedule can operate as a standalone web application, but its real power lies in its close integration with WordPress. The CoSchedule plugin helps you accomplish several tasks at once. You can manage the blog editorial process across multiple team members while planning out promotional tasks (like accompanying social posts and scheduling) to drive traffic once a new article is live.

CoSchedule doesn’t offer a free plan but their Individual Editorial Calendar plan offers a reasonable point of entry for some of the plugin’s best features. Check out their complete Marketing Suite for other useful tools as you scale.

Another useful tool for content promotion is Revive Old Posts (40,000+ active installations).

Revive Old Posts - Social media traffic plugin for WordPress.
Revive Old Posts – Social media traffic plugin for WordPress.

Formerly, Tweet Old Post, Revive Old Posts is a set-it-and-forget-it type of WordPress traffic plugin. It brings new life to old content by periodically resharing custom formatted social posts to Facebook and Twitter. With a premium license, you can also automate blog content resharing to Facebook Groups, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest.

Final Thoughts: 4 Ways to Increase Website Traffic

Whether you’re focused on direct, search, referral, or social traffic, it’s best to establish a system that works toward conversions.

All the traffic in the world is no good if it’s not quality. Besides focusing on tactics to increase website traffic, you must also consider the implication of relevance.

When working to increase website traffic, make sure that your efforts are targeting the most relevant audience. 100 visitors who represent members of your target audience are going to be much better prospects than 1,000 random visitors who will never be interested in buying from you.

Start by understanding where your traffic comes from and you’ll soon leave your competitors in the shade.

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Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is what Google is calling a a new collection of three web performance metrics:

  1. LCP: Largest Contentful Paint
  2. FID: First Input Delay
  3. CLS: Cumulative Layout Shift

These are all measurable. They aren’t in Lighthouse (e.g. the Audits tab in Chrome DevTools) just yet, but sounds like that’s coming up soon. For now, an open source library will get you the numbers. There is also a browser extension (that feels pretty alpha as you have to install it manually).

That’s all good to me. I like seeing web performance metrics evolve into more meaningful numbers. I’ve spent a lot of time in my days just doing stuff like reducing requests and shrinking assets, which is useful, but kind of a side attack to web performance. These metrics are what really matter because they are what users actually see and experience.

The bigger news came today though in that they are straight up telling us: Core Web Vitals matter for your SEO:

Today, we’re building on this work and providing an early look at an upcoming Search ranking change that incorporates these page experience metrics. We will introduce a new signal that combines Core Web Vitals with our existing signals for page experience to provide a holistic picture of the quality of a user’s experience on a web page.

Straight up, these numbers matter for SEO (or they will soon).

And they didn’t bury the other lede either:

As part of this update, we’ll also incorporate the page experience metrics into our ranking criteria for the Top Stories feature in Search on mobile, and remove the AMP requirement from Top Stories eligibility.

AMP won’t be required for the SERP carousel thing, which was the #1 driver of AMP adoption. I can’t wait to see my first non-AMP page up there! I know some features will be unavailable, like the ability to swipe between stories (because that relies on things like the Google AMP cache), but whatever, bring it on. Let AMP just be a thing people use because they want to, and not because they have to.

The post Core Web Vitals appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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A First Look at `aspect-ratio`

Oh hey! A brand new property that affects how a box is sized! That’s a big deal. There are lots of ways already to make an aspect-ratio sized box (and I’d say this custom properties based solution is the best), but none of them are particularly intuitive and certainly not as straightforward as declaring a single property.

So, with the impending arrival of aspect-ratio (MDN, and not to be confused with the media query version), I thought I’d take a look at how it works and try to wrap my mind around it.

Shout out to Una where I first saw this and boy howdy did it strike interest in folks. Here’s me playing around a little.

Just dropping aspect-ratio on an element alone will calculate a height based on the auto width.

Without setting a width, an element will still have a natural auto width. So the height can be calculated from the aspect ratio and the rendered width.

.el {
  aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;
}
Demo

If the content breaks out of the aspect ratio, the element will still expand.

The aspect ratio becomes ignored in that situation, which is actually nice. That’s why the pseudo-element tactic for aspect ratios was popular, because it didn’t put us in dangerous data loss or awkward overlap territory when content got too much.

But if you want to constrain the height to the aspect ratio, you can by adding a min-height: 0;:

Demo

If the element has either a height or width, the other is calculated from the aspect ratio.

So aspect-ratio is basically a way of setting the other direction when you only have one.

Demo

If the element has both a height and width, aspect-ratio is ignored.

The combination of an explicit height and width is “stronger” than the aspect ratio.

Factoring in min-* and max-*

There is always a little tension between width, min-width, and max-width (or the height versions). One of them always “wins.” It’s generally pretty intuitive.

If you set width: 100px; and min-width: 200px; then min-width will win. So, min-width is either ignored because you’re already over it, or wins. Same deal with max-width: if you set width: 100px; and max-width: 50px; then max-width will win. So, max-width is either ignored because you’re already under it, or wins.

It looks like that general intuitiveness carries on here: the min-* and max-* properties will either win or are irrelevant. And if they win, they break the aspect-ratio. 

.el {
  aspect-ratio: 1 / 4;
  height: 500px;

  /* Ignored, because width is calculated to be 125px */
  /* min-width: 100px; */

  /* Wins, making the aspect ratio 1 / 2 */
  /* min-width: 250px; */
}

With value functions

Aspect ratios are always most useful in fluid situations, or anytime you essentially don’t know one of the dimensions ahead of time. But even when you don’t know, you’re often putting constraints on things. Say 50% wide is cool, but you only want it to shrink as far as 200px. You might do width: max(50%, 200px);. Or constrain on both sides with clamp(200px, 50%, 400px);.

This seems to work inutitively:

.el {
  aspect-ratio: 4 / 3;
  width: clamp(200px, 50%, 400px);
}

But say you run into that minimum 200px, and then apply a min-width of 300px? The min-width wins. It’s still intuitive, but it gets brain-bending because of how many properties, functions, and values can be involved.

Maybe it’s helpful to think of aspect-ratio as the weakest way to size an element?

It will never beat any other sizing information out, but it will always do its sizing if there is no other information available for that dimension.

The post A First Look at `aspect-ratio` appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY

Too funny:

After careful consideration, we settled on rearchitecting our platform to use $FLASHY_LANGUAGE and $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY. Not only is $FLASHY_LANGUAGE popular according to the Stack Overflow developer survey, it’s also cross platform; we’re using it to reimplement our mobile apps as well. Rewriting our core infrastructure was fairly straightforward: as we have more engineers than we could possibly ever need or even know what to do with, we simply put a freeze on handling bug reports and shifted our effort to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY instead. We originally had some trouble with adapting to some of $FLASHY_LANGUAGE’s quirks, and ran into a couple of bugs with $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY, but overall their powerful new features let us remove some of the complexity that our previous solution had to handle.

There is absolutely no way Saagar Jha is poking at this or this.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Why we at $FAMOUS_COMPANY Switched to $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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WooCommerce Is Testing a Block-based Cart and Checkout

As part of an ongoing initiative to convert the plugin’s existing shortcodes to blocks, WooCommerce core developers are testing a new block-based cart and checkout experience. This major architectural change has also been redesigned to improve conversion rates for stores.

An initial preview release of the blocks can be tested using the WooCommerce Blocks feature plugin version 2.6.0, which was released yesterday. WooCommerce designer Gary Murray shared screenshots of the new design inside the editor, where store owners can now manipulate a live preview of the cart. It automatically loads demo products in the preview and users can switch between the full cart and the empty cart states.

Cart block

So far, the block settings for the full cart include the option to hide/show the shipping calculator and hide shipping costs until an address is entered. The empty state allows users to do things like change the size of the empty cart icon or replace it with a custom image, edit the “continue shopping” text, and add more blocks.

Store owners can also preview the entire checkout form in the editor, allowing them to immediately see how any settings changes affect the checkout process.

“In some areas we have made incremental improvements (like the cart) while the checkout sees much bigger changes,” Murray said. “Alongside these design changes we have also started the initial ‘migration’ of core cart and checkout settings to block settings and have also included a few new features within the block settings to give merchants more ‘direct’ control of their stores checkout experience.”

One of the major benefits of the new blocks is that it instantly gives store owners more customization options. This is much more user-friendly than the prospect of having to customize specific theme templates for the cart and checkout pages. This implementation of blocks in WooCommerce is another reminder of the magic of blocks to put more power in the hands of users.

The blocks currently support only the following payment methods: Stripe Payment Request (ApplePay, ChromePay), Stripe CC payment method, PayPal Standard, or Cheque. They also do not yet support third-party plugins that integrate with regular cart and checkout shortcodes. The WooCommerce core team is working on making these blocks more extensible but developers should still consider them as being in the experimental stage for now. Check out the initial preview announcement for more information on how to test the new cart and checkout blocks.

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Project Soli Earns Developer App 6 Months Late

Google recently released Soli Sandbox, an Android app for Project Soli on the Pixel 4 phone. Project Soli, enabled by a dedicated chip on the Pixel 4, allows Pixel 4 owners to interact with their phone via certain gestures. The timing of the app's release is puzzling, given Soli's uncertain future.

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Five Major Vulnerabilities in GraphQL

GraphQL (GQL) is a data query language used commonly in modern web and mobile applications as a key part of the technology stack. GQL simplifies fetching data from a server to a client via an API call. This article recaps some thoughts from a post by carvesystems.com, covering the five most common GraphQL vulnerabilities, how to use a GQL “goat” to exemplify vulnerabilities, and some tooling to evaluate GQL implementation.

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GretaThemes Releases Lightweight, Block-Ready eStar WordPress Theme

Screenshot of the front page of the eStar WordPress theme.

GretaThemes launched its eStar theme yesterday. The team’s goal was to build a lightweight theme that focused on the block editor. However, it works alongside other page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, and more.

GretaThemes is a project of eLightUp, which is the same company behind the popular Meta Box framework, WP Auto Listings, and FitWP. The site’s focus is on selling WordPress themes, many of which are pro versions of its free theme offerings. For now, eStar is merely a free theme with no direct commercial upsells.

eStar is promoted as a multipurpose theme that is suitable for various types of sites. In my tests, I found it to be best designed for businesses that need a clean and professional look. However, with enough tweaks via its numerous customizer options, end-users can get a lot of mileage out of this theme.

With gzipping enabled, the theme’s scripts and styles add less than 10 kb of data to the page load. That is reasonably lightweight and should result in a speedy website, assuming nothing else causes issues.

The theme recommends and integrates with the Meta Box and eRocket plugins, both of which are available for free in the WordPress plugin directory. The Meta Box integration will add extra per-post settings, which are primarily related to the layout on the front end. These can be configured globally in the customizer. The plugin integration merely provides the ability to do so on the per-post level. The eRocket plugin adds a contact info and recent posts widget along with social sharing buttons. The eStar theme has additional styles for making these fit into the design on the front end.

eStar ticks many of the boxes that would make it a great go-to option for people who need a reliable theme that supports the block editor. It does not push any artistic boundaries. It is not the type of theme that has an incredible wow factor. It is simply a solid offering that gives users a lot of freedom to take an almost boring default configuration and turn it into something special with a mix of font and color options.

Check out the eStar theme demo for a picture of what the theme looks like.

Build Landing Pages Like a Pro

eStar theme landing page.

The GretaThemes team has designed eStar to get out of the way for users who want to build full pages with either the block editor or a third-party page builder. It offers several post and page templates as a starting point:

  • Blank Canvas: Displays only the post content.
  • Narrow Content: Shows the header, footer, and post content, which is in a narrow column in the center of the page.
  • Full Width: Shows the header, footer, and post content, which stretches across the page.
  • Wide Content: Shows the header, footer, and post content, which stretches across the page.

No, there is no typo or copy/paste mistake for those final two templates in the preceding list. There seems to be no difference between the Full Width and Wide Content templates. I am unsure why both are included, except to wonder if one or the other is there for backward compatibility with other themes.

What makes the theme great at building landing pages so great is not its four custom templates. Those are nice additions that provide an open canvas. However, it is the theme’s block styling that provides the customizability to build these landing pages. Its block styles will not blow you away with unique design takes. They simply work.

The one thing that would bring this theme to the next level would be the addition of custom patterns. The Patterns API is not available in core WordPress yet, but it will likely land this year. Now is a good time for the team to get on top of this feature, even if it is a part of a commercial offering.

How Does the Theme Handle Blogging?

Customized single post layout for the eStar WordPress theme.
Single post view with custom options selected.

The theme markets itself as suitable for blogging. However, it falls short of being a great blogging theme with the default configuration. For long-form content, single posts have far too many characters per line for comfortable reading. For short, media-rich blog posts, it would work well.

To get the most out of eStar as a blogger, users will need to make some adjustments. Fortunately, this is one area in which the theme shines. It provides a slew of customizer options that provide enough flexibility to make it work. By heading to the Fonts section in the customizer and bumping up the Font Size in the Body section, it would transform the theme into something suitable for long-form content.

There are some other adjustments worth considering. If you routinely use the same image within post content as you do as a featured image, the theme will show that same image twice on single post views — a common issue in many themes. eStar does provide a customizer option to configure or disable the featured image on single posts. Using the featured image as the header background is also another useful option the theme provides and can make your posts stand out.

I also recommend disabling the sidebar for blog posts if you enjoy wide or full-width media. The theme’s design stands out when it can make copious use of the page.

The biggest issue — and would be a deal-breaker for me if I could not code — is the theme adds a custom design to the first paragraph of the post content. The font-size is increased and given a light gray color. It is not easy to read. The theme should leave this bit of customization in the user’s hands. WordPress provides block-level customization via the editor if the user needs to do something special with the intro paragraph.

I also recommend switching the archive layout to either grid card or grid, which is used in the theme’s demo. The grid card option looks a little better and is a concept likely lifted from Tailwind’s component documentation.

Grid Card layout for archive pages with the eStar WordPress theme.
Grid Card layout option for archive pages.

Final Thoughts

The theme is not without a few trivial issues. For example, the site title and description feel a little cramped. I would love to see some extra whitespace above and below it.

With the default configuration of the theme, I would recommend it to anyone who needs a solid design for a business website. By throwing in a custom logo and adjusting a couple of colors, the average end-user would have all they need to launch a business site. With the power of the block editor or a third-party page builder, costs to setting up shop would be minimal.

For people who do not mind a little legwork and need something better suited for blogging, the theme can handle it. It will simply take some minor customization to make the text a bit more readable.

Overall, it is nice to see another good option land in the official WordPress theme directory that caters to the block editor. I look forward to seeing what GretaThemes does in the future with its themes and hope to see other theme companies follow suit with block editor support.

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Excelfore Launches SDK for eSync Standard Data Pipeline

Excelfore, a connected automobile solution provider, has introduced a new SDK for the eSync standard data pipeline. eSync is a multi-company alliance for the development of over-the-air (OTA) updates and diagnostics standards. Excelfore's new SDK provides an out of the box solution for embedding the eSync standard into the cloud platform of choice.

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Western Union Shows How Use Cases Make for a Great Developer Experience

If your organization provides APIs, the success of those APIs depends on how well your API developer portal highlights and explains them. Current and future stakeholders will go to your API developer portal to learn everything possible about your API(s) and even your company, both from a technical standpoint and also just as importantly, from a business standpoint. How do you make sure that your developer portal is best-in-class?

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PureCSS Gaze

Diana Smith with another mind-bending all HTML & CSS painting.

I love that these occupy a special place on the “Should I draw this in CSS?” curve. Things like simple shapes are definitely on the “yes” side of the curve. Then there’s a large valley where things get a little too impractical to draw that way, and using some other image format (e.g. SVG) makes way more sense.

Diana’s work pulls the curve back up to the “yes” side. Not only because it’s proof that CSS can be an amazing expressionistic art tool, but also from a performance standpoint — it’s only 2 KB of HTML and 10 KB of CSS.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post PureCSS Gaze appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Background Patterns, Simplified by Conic Gradients

For those who have missed the big news, Firefox now supports conic gradients!

Starting with Firefox 75, released on the April 7, we can go to about:config, look for the layout.css.conic-gradient.enabled flag and set its value to true (it’s false by default and all it takes to switch is double-clicking it).

Screenshot. Shows the Firefox URL bar at `about:config`, a search for 'conic' giving the `layout.css.conic-gradient.enabled` flag as the sole result and its value set to `true`.
Enabling conic gradients in Firefox 75+

With that enabled, now we can test our CSS including conic gradients in Firefox as well.

While some of the demos in this article work just fine when using a polyfill, some use CSS variables inside the conic gradient and therefore require native support for this feature.

One thing I particularly like about conic gradients is just how much they can simplify background patterns. So let’s take a few linear-gradient() patterns from the gallery created by Lea Verou about a decade ago and see how we can now simplify them with conic-gradient!

Pyramid

Screenshot. Shows the original pyramid pattern with the code that was used to create it.
The pyramid pattern

The pattern above uses four linear gradients:

background:
  linear-gradient(315deg, transparent 75%, #d45d55 0) -10px 0,
  linear-gradient(45deg, transparent 75%, #d45d55 0) -10px 0,
  linear-gradient(135deg, #a7332b 50%, transparent 0) 0 0,
  linear-gradient(45deg, #6a201b 50%, #561a16 0) 0 0 #561a16;
background-size: 20px 20px;

That’s quite a bit of CSS and perhaps even a bit intimidating. It’s not easy to just look at this and understand how it all adds up to give us the pyramid pattern. I certainly couldn’t do it. It took me a while to get it, even though gradients are one of the CSS features I’m most comfortable with. So don’t worry if you don’t understand how those gradients manage to create the pyramid pattern because, one, it is complicated and, two, you don’t even need to understand that!

Using conic-gradient(), we can now get the same result in a much simpler manner, with a single background layer instead of four!

What I like to do when coding repeating patterns is draw equidistant vertical and horizontal lines delimiting the rectangular boxes defined by the background-size. In this case, it’s pretty obvious we have square boxes and where their limits are, but it’s a really useful technique for more complex patterns.

Annotated screenshot. Shows the rectangles (squares in this case) defined by the `background-size`.
Highlighting the pattern’s cells

By default, conic gradients start from 12 o’clock and go clockwise. However, in our case, we want to offset the start of the gradient by 45° in the clockwise direction and afterwards make every one of the four shades occupy a quarter (25%) of the available space around the midpoint of our square box.

SVG illustration. Shows how we place a conic gradient into a single pattern cell by rotating the gradient start point 45° in the clockwise (positive) direction.
A pattern cell with a conic gradient’s hard stops at every 25% starting from 45° w.r.t. the vertical axis (live).

This means our pyramid pattern can be reduced to:

$s: 20px;
background:
  conic-gradient(from 45deg, 
    #561a16 25%, 
    #6a201b 0% 50%, 
    #a7332b 0% 75%, 
    #d45d55 0%) 
    50%/ #{$s $s};

Not only does the code look simpler, but we’ve also gone from 260 bytes to 103 bytes, reducing the code needed to get this pattern by more than half.

We’re using the double position syntax as that’s also well supported these days.

We can see it in action in the Pen below:

Checkerboard

Screenshot. Shows the original checkerboard pattern with the code that was used to create it.
The checkerboard pattern

This pattern above is created with two linear gradients:

background-color: #eee;
background-image:
  linear-gradient(45deg, black 25%, transparent 25%, 
    transparent 75%, black 75%, black),
  linear-gradient(45deg, black 25%, transparent 25%, 
    transparent 75%, black 75%, black);
background-size: 60px 60px;
background-position: 0 0, 30px 30px;

Let’s see how we can simplify this CSS when replacing these linear gradients with a conic one!

Just like in the previous case, we draw vertical and horizontal lines in order to better see the rectangles defined by the background-size.

Annotated screenshot. Shows the rectangles (squares in this case) defined by the `background-size`.
Highlighting the pattern’s cells

Looking at the square highlighted in deeppink in the illustration above, we see that, in this case, our conic gradient starts from the default position at 12 o’clock. A quarter of it is black, the next quarter is dirty white and then we have repetition (the same black and then dirty white quarter slices once more).

SVG illustration. Shows how we place a conic gradient into a single pattern cell and then make it repeat after the 50% point.
A pattern cell with a conic gradient’s hard stops at every 25%, starting from the default at 12 o’clock and repeating after 50% (demo).

This repetition in the second half of the [0%, 100%] interval means we can use a repeating-conic-gradient(), which gives us the following code (bringing the compiled CSS from 263 bytes down to only 73 bytes – that’s reducing it by over 70%):

$s: 60px;
background:
  repeating-conic-gradient(#000 0% 25%, #eee 0% 50%) 
    50%/ #{$s $s};

The Pen below shows it in action:

Diagonal checkerboard

Screenshot. Shows the original diagonal checkerboard pattern with the code that was used to create it.
The diagonal checkerboard pattern

Again, we have a pattern created with two linear gradients:

background-color: #eee;
background-image: 
  linear-gradient(45deg, black 25%, transparent 25%, 
    transparent 75%, black 75%, black),
  linear-gradient(-45deg, black 25%, transparent 25%, 
    transparent 75%, black 75%, black);
background-size: 60px 60px;

We draw horizontal and vertical lines to split this pattern into identical rectangles:

Annotated screenshot. Shows the rectangles (squares in this case) defined by the `background-size`.
Highlighting the pattern’s cells

What we now have is pretty much the same checkerbox pattern as before, with the sole difference that we don’t start from the default position at 12 o’clock, but from 45° in the clockwise direction.

If you’re having trouble visualising how simply changing the start angle can make us go from the previous pattern to this one, you can play with it in the interactive demo below:

Note that this demo does not work in browsers that have no native support for conic gradients.

This means our code looks as follows:

$s: 60px;
background:
  repeating-conic-gradient(from 45deg, 
    #000 0% 25%, #eee 0% 50%) 
  50%/ #{$s $s};

We can see it in action below:

Again, not only is the code simpler to understand, but we’ve also gone from 229 bytes to only 83 bytes in the compiled CSS, reducing it by almost two-thirds!

Half-Rombes

Screenshot. Shows the original Half-Rombes pattern with the code that was used to create it.
The half-rombes pattern

This pattern was created with four linear gradients:

background: #36c;
background:
  linear-gradient(115deg, transparent 75%, rgba(255,255,255,.8) 75%) 0 0,
  linear-gradient(245deg, transparent 75%, rgba(255,255,255,.8) 75%) 0 0,
  linear-gradient(115deg, transparent 75%, rgba(255,255,255,.8) 75%) 7px -15px,
  linear-gradient(245deg, transparent 75%, rgba(255,255,255,.8) 75%) 7px -15px,
  #36c;
background-size: 15px 30px;

Just like in the previous cases, we draw equidistant vertical and horizontal lines in order to better see the repeating unit:

Annotated screenshot. Shows the rectangles (squares in this case) defined by the `background-size`.
Highlighting the pattern’s cells.

What we have here is a pattern that’s made up of congruent isosceles triangles (the angled edges are equal and the dark blue triangles are a reflection of the light blue ones) formed by the intersection of equidistant parallel lines that are either horizontal, angled clockwise, or the other way. Each of these three types of parallel lines is highlighted in the illustration below:

Illustration. Shows the equidistant parallel lines which create the pattern of isosceles triangles.
Parallel guides

Every pattern cell contains a full triangle and two adjacent triangle halves in the upper part, then a reflection of this upper part in the lower part. This means we can identify a bunch of congruent right triangles that will help us get the angles we need for our conic-gradient():

SVG illustration. Shows how we place a conic gradient into a single pattern cell by rotating the gradient start point by an angle β in the clockwise (positive) direction such that the 0% line goes through the top right corner and then all the other hard stops are either horizontal or going through the cell corners.
A pattern cell with a conic gradient’s hard stops such that they’re either horizontal or go through the cell corners, all starting from β w.r.t. the vertical axis (demo)

This illustration shows us that the gradient starts from an angle, β, away from the default conic gradient start point at 12 o’clock. The first conic slice (the top right half triangle) goes up to α, the second one (the bottom right dark triangle) up to 2·α, and the third one (the bottom light triangle) goes halfway around the circle from the start (that’s 180°, or 50%). The fourth one (the bottom left dark triangle) goes to 180° + α and the fifth one (the top left light triangle) goes to 180° + 2·α, while the sixth one covers the rest.

SVG illustration. Highlights the right triangle from where we can get α knowing the catheti and shows how we can then compute β.
Getting α and β (demo)

From the highlighted right triangle we get that:

tan(α) = (.5·h)/(.5·w) = h/w

Knowing the width (w) and height (h) of a pattern cell, we can get the angles α and β:

α = atan(h/w)
β = 90° - α

It results in the pattern that’s generated by the following code:

$w: 15px;
$h: 30px;
$a: atan($h/$w)*180deg/pi();
$b: 90deg - $a;
$c0: #36c;
$c1: #d6e0f5;

html {
  background: 
    conic-gradient(from $b, 
      $c1 0% $a, 
      $c0 0% 2*$a, 
      $c1 0% 50%, 
      $c0 0% 180deg + $a, 
      $c1 0% 180deg + 2*$a, 
      $c0 0%) 
    0 0/ #{$w $h};
}

This means going from 343 bytes to only 157 bytes in the compiled CSS. The result can be seen below:

You can tweak the pattern width ($w) and height ($h) in the Sass code in order to see how the pattern gets squished and stretched for different aspect ratios.

In the particular case where the angle between 2*$a and 50% (or 180deg) is also $a, it results that $a is 60deg, our isosceles triangles are equilateral, and our gradient can be reduced to a repeating one (and under 100 bytes in the compiled CSS):

$a: 60deg;
$b: 90deg - $a;
$w: 15px;
$h: $w*tan($a);
$c0: #36c;
$c1: #d6e0f5;

html {
  background: 
    repeating-conic-gradient(from $b, 
      $c1 0% $a, $c0 0% 2*$a) 
    0 0/ #{$w $h}
}

The live result can be seen below:

Bonus: Intersecting line backgrounds!

Screenshot. Shows the original intersecting lines pattern with the code that was used to create it.
Intersecting line background examples

While these are not repeating patterns, they’re examples of a situation where a single conic gradient achieves an effect that would have previously needed a bunch of linear ones.

What we have here is a conic-gradient() created starting from two straight lines intersecting within the rectangular box where we set the background.

SVG illustration. Shows a rectangular box and two random lines intersecting inside it. This intersection point (x,y) is the point the conic gradient goes around, while the gradient's start is from the angle β formed by the line segment closest to the top right corner with the vertical. The hard stops are at α, the angle between the start segment and the next one in clockwise order, at 50% and at 180° + α.
Bonus pattern structure (ldemo)

The gradient goes around the point of coordinates, x,y, where the two straight lines intersect. It starts from an angle, β, which is the angle of the line segment that’s closest to the top-right corner, then has hard stops at α, 50% (or 180°) and 180° + α.

If we want to have multiple elements with similar such patterns created with the help of different intersecting lines and different palettes, we have the perfect use case for CSS variables:

.panel {
  background: 
    conic-gradient(from var(--b) at var(--xy), 
      var(--c0) var(--a), var(--c1) 0% 50%, 
      var(--c2) 0% calc(180deg + var(--a)), var(--c3) 0%);
}

All we have to do is set the position (--xy), the start angle (--b), the first angle (--a) and the palette (--c0 through --c3).

.panel {
  /* same as before */
  
  &:nth-child(1) {
    --xy: 80% 65%; 
    --b: 31deg;
    --a: 121deg; 
    --c0: #be5128;
    --c1: #ce9248;
    --c2: #e4c060;
    --c3: #db9c4e
  }
  
  /* similarly for the other panels */
}

Instead of hardcoding, we could also generate these values randomly or extract them from a data object with the help of a CSS or HTML preprocessor. In this second case, we’d set these custom properties inline, which is precisely what I did in the Pen below:

Since we’re using custom properties inside the conic gradients, this demo does not work in browsers that don’t support them natively.

Well, that’s it! I hope you’ve enjoyed this article and that it gives you some ideas about how conic gradients can make your life easier.

The post Background Patterns, Simplified by Conic Gradients appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Collective #607

Collective item image

Untools

A collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.

Check it out
Collective item image

Boids

Marius Ballot made this wonderful boid simulation with Three.js.

Check it out
Collective item image

Htmx

Htmx allows you to access AJAX, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext.

Check it out

Collective #607 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

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Getting Started With Chrome and Firefox Developer Tools

Getting Started With Chrome And Firefox Developer Tools
Chrome and Firefox are modern web browsers that have built-in tools to help developers edit pages and fix problems directly in the browser. Chrome has its developer tools and Firefox has its developer tools. Both have many overlapping features and some unique features. In …
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WordPress Conversion Tracking Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Do you want to add conversion tracking features to your WordPress website?

Conversion tracking helps you measure the impact of your marketing efforts and makes it easier to understand how users interact with your website.

In this guide, we will show you how to add conversion tracking in WordPress and track your conversions like a total pro.

Ultimate Guide to conversion tracking in WordPress

This is a comprehensive WordPress conversion tracking guide, so we have divided it up into different sections. Here is what we’ll cover in this guide:

What is Conversion Tracking?

Conversion tracking is the ability to track and measure the success of your various marketing efforts.

Depending on your business, the conversion is the desired action you want users to perform on your website.

  • For an online store or eCommerce website, a conversion could be a successful purchase.
  • For a news/blog site, the conversion could be a successful subscription to the email newsletter.
  • For a professional services website, a conversion could be a user filling up a contact form.

Simply put, conversion tracking shows you how many of your website visitors successfully perform the desired action.

Why is Conversion Tracking Important?

Conversion tracking is important because it helps you make data-driven decisions to grow your business.

For instance, it shows that users from a specific traffic source are more likely to convert. You can then focus your attention on getting more traffic from that particular source.

Conversion tracking also helps you uncover the users who are not converting so well.

For instance, you may learn that users open the contact page, but many abandon it before submitting the form. You can then make your form easier by removing unnecessary fields, making it conversational, changing colors, setting up partial form submission, etc.

Basically, you need conversion tracking to measure your success and failures and then improve upon them to grow your online business.

That being said, let’s take a look at what tools we’ll need to set up conversion tracking in WordPress.

Tools You Need to Setup Conversion Tracking in WordPress

Most conversion optimization experts rely heavily on Google Analytics. It is a free tool provided by Google that helps you track your website traffic.

It shows where your users are coming from, and what they do while on your website.

If you are running Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads to promote your business, then you’ll need to set up those for conversion tracking.

This may sound complicated, but you’ll only have to set it up once, and we’ll walk you through every step of the way.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Setting Up Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics

First, you need to install Google Analytics on your website.

The easiest way to do this is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market that comes with enhanced eCommerce tracking, form tracking, and other conversion tracking tools built-in.

You’ll need the PRO version of the plugin to access eCommerce and other conversion tracking features. For basic tracking, the free version works as well.

Simply install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you’ll see the setup wizard. Go ahead and click the ‘Launch the Wizard’ button.

Launch setup wizard

Next, you can follow the on-screen instructions to connect your WordPress site to Google Analytics using MonsterInsights. For more details, see our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

With MonsterInsights, you can also easily create a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) property. GA4 is the latest version of the famous analytics platform, and it will replace the old version on July 1, 2023.

To learn more, please see our guide on how to switch to Google Analytics 4 in WordPress.

Now that you have installed Google Analytics, let’s set up conversion tracking on your website.

Turning on Enhanced Ecommerce Conversion Tracking

Ecommerce tracking helps you see which products are doing well on your site, which products are being looked at but not purchased, and what’s bringing you the most revenue.

Google Analytics comes with enhanced eCommerce tracking, which works for most eCommerce websites, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and more. However, you’ll need to enable it for your website manually.

Step 1. Turn on eCommerce Tracking in MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights comes with an eCommerce addon that lets you properly set up eCommerce conversion tracking in Google Analytics.

It works with all top eCommerce platforms for WordPress, including WooCommerce, MemberPress, LifterLMS, Easy Digital Downloads, and more.

First, you need to visit the Insights » Addons page to install and activate the eCommerce addon.

Install the eCommerce addon

Step 2. Turn on Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics

Next, you need to enable enhanced eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account. Go to your Google Analytics dashboard and select your website.

From here, you need to click on the Admin button located at the bottom left corner of the screen.

Go to admin settings

On the next screen, you’ll see different Google Analytics settings.

Under the ‘View’ column, click the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ link.

Ecommerce settings

After that, you need to turn on the ‘Enable Ecommerce’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’ options.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button when you’re done.

Enable ecommerce and enhanced ecommerce reporting

Google Analytics will now turn on the eCommerce reporting feature for your account.

Afterward, you can return to your WordPress dashboard and visit the Insights » Settings page. From here, switch to the eCommerce tab.

Use enhanced ecommerce option

MonsterInsights will automatically detect your eCommerce software and enable advanced eCommerce tracking for your store.

Note: the manual process for adding eCommerce conversion tracking has a lot of room for errors, so we strongly recommend using a plugin like MonsterInsights.

Viewing eCommerce Conversion Tracking Reports

Now that you have enabled eCommerce conversion tracking on your website. Let’s see how to view these reports and use them to make informed decisions about your business.

Ecommerce Conversion Reports in MonsterInsights

Simply go to the Insights » Reports page inside the WordPress admin area and then switch to the eCommerce tab.

Ecommerce report in MonsterInsights

At the top, you’ll see your most important metrics, like the conversion rate, transactions, revenue, and average order value.

Below that, you will see a list of your top products with quantity, sale percentage, and total revenue. This shows you which products are doing well in your store.

Next, you’ll see your top conversion sources with the number of visits, conversion share, and revenue. You can see which sources are bringing you more revenue and which traffic sources are not very effective.

Top conversion sources

MonsterInsights will also show you shopper behavior reports with the number of times products were added to and removed from the cart.

That’s not all the data. You can drill down these reports even further inside Google Analytics.

Ecommerce Conversion Reports in Google Analytics

In Google Analytics 4, you can head to Reports » Monetization » Overview to view the report.

View ecommerce report in GA4

Here, you can see the total revenue your online store is making. Besides that, there are more metrics you can track, like items purchased, first-time purchasers, and total purchases.

On the other hand, you can visit your Universal Analytics dashboard and click on the Conversions » Ecommerce from the left column.

Ecommerce report in analytics

The overview section offers the most important stats, such as revenue, conversion rate, transactions, and average order value.

You can further drill down to view different reports. For example, you can switch to shopping and checkout behavior reports to see how users reach the conversion page. You can also figure out what stopped them at the last minute from completing the transaction.

You may also want to see our guide on how to set up WooCommerce conversion tracking.

Turning on Form Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics

Not all websites use an eCommerce platform to conduct business. For instance, a restaurant website may use an order delivery form, or a salon may use a booking form.

Many businesses use contact forms to capture leads from their website. A lot of news and blogs use an email newsletter to convert website visitors into subscribers.

To track them, you need to enable form conversion tracking in Google Analytics.

MonsterInsights comes with a Forms addon that lets you easily track form conversions on your WordPress site. It works with all popular WordPress form plugins, including WPForms, Formidable Forms, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, and more.

Simply go to the Insights » Addons page. Scroll down to the ‘Forms’ addon, and then click on the Install button.

Install forms addon

Upon activation, you need to visit the Insights » Settings page and switch to the ‘Conversions’ tab.

MonsterInsights will automatically detect your WordPress form plugin and will also start tracking miscellaneous WordPress forms on your site.

MonsterInsights settings - conversions tab

Viewing Your Form Conversion Reports

You can now view your form conversion reports inside your WordPress admin area.

Head over to the Insights » Reports page and switch to the ‘Forms’ tab.

Forms report

You’ll see a list of forms on your website with their impressions, conversion, and conversion rates.

This helps in tracking how each WordPress form is performing. You can optimize low-converting forms while increasing the visibility of high-converting forms.

For more details, please see our guide on how to set up form tracking in Google Analytics.

Setting Up Goals for Conversion Tracking in Universal Analytics

So far, we have covered how to track eCommerce and form conversions.

What if you wanted to manually set up conversion goals and track them in Google Analytics?

For instance, you may want to consider users visiting a specific page as a conversion. Since it is not a form submission or an eCommerce transaction, it will not appear as a conversion in your reports.

Universal Analytics allows you to create your own goals and track their conversion.

However, an important thing to note is that Google Analytics 4 doesn’t have goals anymore. It is one of the major differences you’ll see between the new and old versions.

That said, let’s see how to set them up in Universal Analytics and track them on your website.

Go to the Google Analytics dashboard and click the ‘Admin’ tab on the bottom left. Then, in the View column, click on Goals.

Click on goals

Now, you will need to create a new goal.

Simply click the ‘+ New Goal’ button to set up a new goal.

Add a new goal

Next, you will need to select the goal type. Universal Analytics offers 4 types:

  • Destination: This tracks whether a visitor went to a specific page. This could be a thank you page or any conversion page on your site.
  • Duration: This tracks how long a visitor spends on your website. More time spent on a website means more engagement.
  • Pages/Screens per session: This tracks how many pages an average visitor looks at on your site.
  • Event: This can track all sorts of things, like button clicks, video plays, and downloads. It requires a bit more setup than the other options.

Destination and Event types are the most commonly used goal types for most businesses.

For this tutorial, we will create a ‘Destination’ goal to track visitors who view our thank you page after completing a form.

First, provide a name for your Goal. It needs to be something meaningful so that you can easily identify it in your Google Analytics reports.

After that, choose ‘Destination’ as your goal type and click the Continue button.

Enter goal description

Now you can simply provide the last part of the URL you want to track as the destination.

For instance, if your page is:
https://www.example.com/thank-you-for-booking/

Then you should enter the following:
/thank-you-for-booking/

Add goal details

Below that, you can optionally add value for the conversion. This makes sense if people are completing a payment form or if you know how much each lead is worth to you on average.

If you want to track a funnel, such as a customer moving through a checkout process, then you can also do this as part of the destination goal. This can help you pinpoint areas you might want to improve.

Once you’re happy with your goal, click the Save button. You should then see your goal listed in a table. You can edit it, switch it off and on, or create more goals here.

View new goal

Viewing Your Goal Conversions in Universal Analytics

Now that you have created your goal, allow Google Analytics to collect some data. After that, you can view your Goal Conversion report under the Google Analytics dashboard.

Simply, go to the Conversions » Goals and then click on Overview.

View goal conversions in analytics

Like all Google Analytics reports, you can drill down to view visitor journeys and get deeper insights.

For more details, see our complete guide on setting up goals in Google Analytics.

Setting Up Events in Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 replaces goals with events. You can manually configure events to track different user interactions in GA4.

First, you’ll need to go to the ‘Admin’ settings from your GA4 property.

Go to admin settings

Next, you will need to navigate to the Property column.

After that, simply click the ‘Event’s option.

Go to events settings

You are now ready to create a new event in GA4.

Simply click the ‘Create event’ button to get started.

Create a new event

You should now see a new window slide in from the right. This is where all your custom events will be listed.

Go ahead and click the ‘Create’ button.

Create a custom event

On the next screen, you can enter details of your new event.

Google Analytics 4 already has pre-built events. Simply click the Custom event name dropdown menu and choose an event. For example, we’ll select the ‘file_download’ event for this tutorial.

Select an event name

GA4 will automatically enter the specific Parameter and Operator for your custom event.

Next, you can enter a value for your event. For instance, we will enter ‘.pdf’ since we want to track PDF file downloads. However, you can enter any specific word you use to organize filenames on your site.

Enter event parameter operator and value

After entering these details, click the ‘Create’ button at the top.

You will now see your new custom event listed under the Custom events area in GA4.

View custom event

Viewing Your Event Conversions in Google Analytics 4

Now that you’ve created a custom event in GA4, the next step is to view the conversions.

To do that, simply head to Reports » Engagement » Event: Event name from the menu on your left and view the report.

View custom events data

You can now repeat this step to track other custom events.

That said, an easier way of tracking user behavior is by using MonsterInsights. The plugin automatically sets up different events in Google Analytics.

This way, you don’t have to manually configure events or worry about messing up your tracking.

Google Ads Conversion Tracking in WordPress

If you run Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) to bring targeted traffic to your website, then you may want to track those conversions.

Setting up is a bit complicated because it requires adding code to your website. However, with MonsterInsights, you can easily set up Google Ads conversion tracking without editing code or hiring a developer.

First, you can go to Insights » Addons from your WordPress dashboard and install the Ads addon.

Install the ads addon

Once you install the addon, it should automatically activate.

From here, you can go to Insights » Settings and head to the Publisher tab.

Publisher settings in MonsterInsights

Next, you can scroll down to the ‘Ads Tracking’ section.

Here, you will need to enter the Conversion ID, which will be in this format: AW-123456789.

Enter conversion ID and label

If you’re tracking Google Ads on an eCommerce store, then you can also enter the Conversion Label.

To find the Conversion ID and Conversion Label, you’ll need to go to your Google Ads dashboard and create a conversion action.

For more details, please follow our step-by-step guide on how to set up Google Ads conversion tracking in WordPress.

Viewing Google Ads Conversion Reports in Google Analytics 4

Your Google Ads conversion tracking will now appear in your Google Analytics reports.

In Google Analytics 4, you can head to Acquisition » Acquisition overview and then navigate to the ‘Session Google Ads’ report.

After that, click the ‘View Google Ads campaigns’ option at the bottom of the report.

View session google ads campaign report

This will expand the report and show more details about your ad campaigns.

You can see the total number of users, sessions, Google Ads clicks, and more.

View detailed stats for each campaign

Viewing Google Ads Conversion Reports in Universal Analytics

For Universal Analytics, you can open your website property.

After that, view the Google Ads report by going to the Acquisition » Google Ads » Campaigns section. Here, you can see conversions for all your paid campaigns.

View Google ads report in UA

Use UTM Parameters for Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics

UTM parameters are special tags you can add to URLs to pass important information to Google Analytics.

For instance, if you want to track users coming from a particular ad, then you can add UTM parameters to your ad URL like this:

https://yourwebsite.com/special-offer/?utm_source=ads&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=bfad

You can also use UTM parameters anywhere you want to share your URLs.

For instance, your email newsletter, Tweets, SMS campaigns, and more.

https://yourwebsite.com/special-offer/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=jan_sale

MonsterInsights makes it super easy to build URLs with UTM parameters. Simply head over to the Insights » Tools page and select the ‘URL Builder’ tab.

Go to tools in MonsterInsights

Simply enter the UTM parameters you want to use, and it will automatically generate the URL, which you can then use in your campaigns.

For instance, you can enter a campaign source, like a newsletter or Google, which tells you where the users are coming from. After that, you can define a campaign medium, such as emails or banner ads, and enter a campaign name.

Enter campaign source and medium

MonsterInsights will also give you additional options to add campaign terms and content.

This is useful if you’re split-testing different emails or paid campaigns.

For creating a custom URL, you can leave these options blank.

Additional options in URL builder

Next, you can scroll down to the bottom to see your custom URL.

Go ahead and use the link for campaigns and track conversions on your website.

The URL created by the MonsterInsights URL builder tool, with UTM parameters in place

Viewing UTM Parameter Reports in Google Analytics 4

Now that you’ve added UTM parameters to a URL, you can track its performance in Google Analytics.

First, log in to your GA4 account. After that, head to Reports » Acquisition » Traffic Acquisition from the menu on your left.

View traffic acquisition report

You should now see traffic from different sources on your website, such as organic search, email, display, and more.

You can use the search bar to filter the traffic source for your custom campaign. For example, if you’re tracking conversions from a newsletter, then you can look up ‘Email’ in the report.

View different traffic sources

After that, you further drill down and filter your traffic.

Simply click the ‘+’ button under the search bar.

Click the plus button

GA4 will then show different options to filter your traffic.

You can select Traffic source » Session source from the dropdown list.

Select session source

Next, Google Analytics will list your email campaigns.

You can now see which campaign performs best and gets the most conversions.

View newsletter URL report in ga4

Viewing UTM Parameter Reports in Universal Analytics

In Universal Analytics, you can track the conversions of your campaigns under your Google Analytics dashboard.

Simply switch to the Acquisition » Campaigns » All Campaigns report.

Go to all campaigns

Your campaigns will appear here.

You can click on any of them to drill down further.

View newsletter tracking report

Setting Up Facebook Conversion Tracking in WordPress

Facebook is the largest social media website on the planet, with billions of active users. This is why Facebook ads are sometimes the easiest way to reach a niche audience.

Now, if you are running Facebook ads, then you may want to see how well your ads are doing by implementing conversion tracking for your Facebook ads.

Usually, you’d need to add a code snippet to your WordPress website to track Facebook conversions. However, WPCode makes it very simple, and you can simply enter the Facebook Pixel ID to set up tracking.

First, you’ll need to log in to Facebook and visit the Meta Business Suite. Then, click on All Tools » Events Manager.

Go to event manager

Next, you need to add a data source to the Event Manager.

Simply click the ‘+ Connect to Data Sources’ button in the left-hand menu.

Connect data source

You should now see different options to connect your new data source.

Go ahead and select the ‘Web’ option and click the ‘Connect’ button to continue.

Connect new data source

After that, enter a name for your pixel.

Once that’s done, you can click the ‘Create Pixel’ button.

Create a Facebook pixel

Next, you need to choose how to connect your website and send activity to Facebook.

At the bottom, you will see the Facebook Pixel. Go ahead and copy the pixel ID.

Choose how to connect to your site

Next, you can return to your WordPress website dashboard and install and activate the WPCode Free Plugin plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note that you’ll need at least the WPCode Plus plan because it includes the Conversion Pixel Addon. However, there is also a free version of WPCode you can use to get started.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Code Snippets » Conversion Pixel page and go to the Facebook tab. From here, you need to paste the Facebook Pixel ID in the respective field.

Add Facebook pixel ID

WPCode will now automatically add the code to your site that’s needed to track Facebook ad conversions.

Setting Up Twitter Conversion Tracking in WordPress

If you run Twitter Ads to promote your business, then you’ll need to set up Twitter conversion tracking to measure the success of your ads.

Simply log in to your Twitter Ads account and click on the Tools » Event manager from the menu at the top.

Twitter event manager

You should now see a pixel created by Twitter.

Go ahead and click the ‘View Twitter Pixel’ option.

View the Twitter pixel

On the next screen, you will see different options to add the Twitter pixel to your site.

You can use the ‘Pixel Code’ method and simply copy the code.

Copy the pixel code

You will need to add this code to the header of your WordPress site.

First, you need to switch back to your WordPress website’s admin area.

If you haven’t already done so, then go ahead and install and activate the WPCode plugin. For more details, please see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Code Snippets » Header & Footer page. Now you can paste the Twitter pixel code into the Header section.

Enter the Twitter pixel

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

After you have successfully installed the pixel code, you can track conversions on your Twitter Ads account.

Optimizing Conversion Rates to Boost Sales

Once you start tracking conversions on your website, the next step is to improve those conversion rates.

You’d be surprised how little things can make a huge impact on your business.

The best way to improve your conversions is by using OptinMonster. It is the best conversion optimization software on the market and helps you convert more visitors into customers.

OptinMonster comes with tools like lightbox popups, fullscreen welcome mats, countdown timers, slide-in boxes, and more.

Choose a campaign type and template

It integrates with any email marketing service and works with all popular eCommerce platforms.

OptinMonster’s display rules allow you to show targeted messages to your customers at the precise time and nudge them into making a buying decision.

Upsell popup preview

For instance, if you notice that customers are leaving a product page without taking any action, then you can offer them a discount when they are about to exit.

Similarly, you can run time-sensitive campaigns to trigger the FOMO effect and give customers a nudge in the right direction.

For more practical tips, see our guide on how ways to recover WooCommerce abandoned cart sales.

We hope this guide helped you set up conversion tracking in WordPress. You may also want to see our comparison of the best email marketing services and the ultimate guide to WordPress speed and performance.

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The post WordPress Conversion Tracking Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide first appeared on WPBeginner.