Google Analytics - Conversions

Traffic, goals and conversions.

If most marketers are to be believed then the be and end all of having a successful website is the amount of traffic you can generate to it. Whilst traffic is certainly a big factor and I'm not going to say it it isn't - what you do with that traffic can make a huge difference to your bottom line.

In addition to what you do with the traffic is how you monitor and analyse it. So for the next few days I'm going to take a look at how you do this.

In the early days of internet marketing there was no pay per click. It just didn't exist and so all marketing efforts were pretty much done by trial and error. It was common (and still is) for people to build a junk site and then spend a lot of resource madly adding backlinks to increase their SEO positions. More traffic = more sales.

Once pay per click was invented all of that changed

Using pay per click you can test whether or not a site concept is going to work by running a small campaign and then using analytics to determine how the site is performing, without pay per click the only way to do it is to spend a long time building search engine rankings and hoping for the best.

In 2004 I went to work for http://www.propertymentor.co.uk as their SEO specialist. The company was spending a lot of money on pay per click and  needed to arrest the spending increase and build some natural search engine listings to help with the overall traffic growth.

At the time the company head office was in Milton Keynes and as I lived in Telford part of my employment deal was that I would have one of the flats the company owned close to the office. I'd drive down on a Sunday night (I just couldn't bear sitting in Monday morning motorway traffic) stay during the week and drive back on a Friday lunchtime. Boy am I glad that these days I don't have to do any commuting!

Milton Keynes is a testament to humans attempting to triumph over nature. It's a concrete paradise. It's the biggest parking lot in the south of the UK with nowhere to actually park. The road system is built on the american grid system and it's endless traffic lights and concrete hidden by trees. It's awful.

The original property mentor site was a very basic site with no fancy graphics or any gadgets and it sold through very powerful copy writing. The founder of the company was very good at persuasive copy writing and that is what built the business in the first place. The site got a reasonable amount of traffic and was doing well.

Over a three year period I refined and tested a pay per click campaign that generated a lot of business for the company but something was wrong and I knew it. We were leaving a lot of money on the table through lack of attention to what the visitor was actually doing on the site once they got there.

Goals VS Conversions

In google analytics you can specify "goals" for the actions that you want a visitor to complete. This is different from "conversions" which are a pay per click element. You can use both tracking systems to ascertain how well your site is performing.

Let's take a simple four to five page ebook site as an example.

The goals that you want to track for this site are going to be laid out in your "goal funnel". Don't have a goal funnel? let me explain.

When a visitor get's to your site you want them to complete an action. Otherwise what's the point of having them visit the site? The action you want them to complete is defined as a "goal".

For our fictional ebook site we need to construct the pages in such a way that each page follows on from the previous page in a logical fashion. For example the index page has the basic enticing headline and body copy getting the visitor juiced up for what is to come. It should then be a natural progression for them to visit the "testimonials" page and then onto the order page. This is your goal funnel.

So in analytics we would design our first goal funnel as:

Index.html
Excerpts.html
Testimonials.html
order.html

When we come to look at our analytics "goals" we can see how many completed goals we got for the total amount of visitors and this will give us our "goal average"

In this goal funnel we can now begin to analyse our droput rate. These are the visitors that don't follow the logical sequence that we want them to follow and get distracted by the "about us" page or "FAQ" page.

To begin with I recommend you have the goal funnel that you want the visitors to funnel through and one for the ultimate goal which is page views of your order page. Don't get bogged down in creating multiple funnels to analyse.

What you will get after a couple of days collecting the data is an analytics report which will show you where people are abandoning your carefully constructed funnel.

Once you have this data it will look something like this:

Index.html 100%
Excerpts.html 60%
Testimonials.html 20%
order.html 20%

Now we can see that we have a huge drop out of our funnel of people going from the excerpts page to the testimonials page and we need to take a look at our excerpts page to make it stronger. Perhaps the heading needs strengthening or maybe the testimonials themselves need beefing up.

By following this process through you will squeeze more revenue from the same amount of traffic.

So, if you use pay per click conversions to tell you how much each keyword is costing you to get a conversion you can now visualise what the visitor does when they reach your site from each individual keyword through your goal funnel.