Conversion Tracking

A boat needs a rudder as much as a website needs a goal (or three).

Without identifying and measuring the goals for your website you are completely rudderless when trying to assess your achievements on the web. Sure you can count the number of visitors; but what does this really mean to your business?

Most websites have been designed and created with a business goal in mind. Typical goals include getting visitors to register their interest, purchase a product or join a membership program.

Tracking these goals will tell us how successful our website is. We can measure:

• The number of visitors that completed these goals.
• The advertising campaigns that worked best to bring visitors who achieved these goals.
• The points visitors drop out of the goal conversion process.

There are many ways in which we can measure all of these and more. In some cases your existing systems will tell you this in their reporting, however this information is usually about how many people complete the task and mostly doesn't tie the outcome to the advertising that generated it. To get the full picture you need a professional web reporting tool.

Google Analytics, Urchin, ClickTracks and many other web reporting tools provide the ability to track goals and advertising campaigns. Each campaign can be tracked against the outcomes that it generates. It is important to note that not every web reporting tool provides this function. For instance if you use Analog, Webalizer, AWStats and other low end tools then you can't measure goals and advertising. If you are unsure about whether your current software product can measure goals and advertising, then please contact our sales team for a review of your current product.

Typically a goal is tracked based on a visitor seeing one page on the website at least once during their visit. In this article we use the example of a white paper that a visitor may download from the website. The process that the visitor must follow to get the white paper is:

1. View the landing page with the offer of the white paper
2. Complete a short form
3. Submit the form and if there are no errors then send the link to the white paper to their email address
4. Visitor clicks on the email link to get the white paper.

There are two possible goals that we can track; steps 3 & 4.     We will track step 3 first as this more immediately important for the business as it means that the visitor has exchanged their detail for the white paper. Step 4 is also important however as it requires that they click on the link in their email, it may be more difficult to track.

The screenshot shown above shows the % of visitors from each medium (cpc, organic search, etc) that have completed the white paper registration form. This information is crucial in being able to assess the effectiveness of advertising in each of these mediums. Where a medium is converting well, this can justify the continuation of investing in advertising in this channel. Where it is not then the expenditure can be reduced or a testing plan put in place to improve results.

Further once we have identified the steps that are required to track the goal, we can start to measure how many visitors started the process and how many completed the goal. The web reporting tools mentioned above all have the ability to track the progression of visitors through this process via a sales or conversion funnel report. This report shows how many visitors progressed to each stage of the process, the point where they left and where else they went to on the site. The funnel report is an excellent diagnostic tool that enables you to quickly diagnose the key drop off points. You can then use this information to test these pages and find areas in which improvements can be made.

Setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics is relatively straight forward for simple goals. First visit your website and go through the process of completing the goal/s that you set on your website. At each stage in the process take note of the URL that is shown in the browser. It is useful to copy and paste these into a text document and save it for later use.

Log into Google Analytics and edit your profile. Click on the edit link next to the goals and enter the values into the appropriate field. Save the changes and your goals will start tracking from the following day.

The process is explained in detail in our Google Analytics at a Glance – Setting Up Goal Tracking document which you can download in PDF format here.

Setting up goal tracking can be tricky to get it right. If you need assistance with setting up goal tracking please contact us or attend one of our Google Analytics training courses.

For further details of our professional services, please visit our Google Analytics Services page.