Using Google Analytics to Track Your Conversions
- ARTICLES |
It can be said without exaggeration that tracking your website's conversion rate is one of the most important components in your online business. Let's say that you have a product and you came up with a price that you thought made sense, set up the sales page and started sending traffic to that page. When you started making sales, you figured that was pretty cool and then moved on to the next project. But then you are hanging out with a fellow Internet marketer who is sharing an embarrassing story about how he never split tested his product's price or the landing page until recently, and when he analyzed the results of the test and changed the price, sales increased by 120%!
Yes, you can make a simple change to your landing page, even to the color of a button and see drastic changes to your site's conversion rate. But how do you track your current conversions so that you know what's working and what needs tweaking? Well, fortunately for you, Google Analytics can do all of this and more for free. Let's look at how you can use GA to track your website's conversions:
After you have signed up for your Google Analytics account, you will get a tracking code that you will need to install on your website. If you are running a WordPress blog, there is a handy Google Analytics for WordPress plugin that you can install that makes adding the tracking code quite simple to install.
Using Google Analytics to track conversion rates
Step 1: Create a 'Thank You' page for the product that you are testing conversions for and copy and paste the URL for that new page into a Notepad file because you're going to need it soon.
Step 2: Using the Goal Tracking feature in Google Analytics
From within your website's profile in GA, click on the 'edit' button to the right of the link for your website.
You will be brought to the 'Profile Settings' page for your website, and if you scroll down just a little bit you will see a section called, 'Goals.' Google Analytics allows you to create up to 20 conversion goals for each website profile.
Click on the 'Add goal,' link.
Give your goal a name, such as the name of the product, and then under 'Goal Type,' choose 'URL Destination,'
Here is where you will put the link to the Thank you page that you created earlier. If the enter URL to that page is, http://mycoolblog.com/thank-you, then you would paste "/thank you/" as your goal URL.
It's as simple as that. Now you just have to wait a few days before you start seeing results because Google Analytics does not work in real time.
Now that you know how to set up basic goals using Google Analytics, you can set up goals to track newsletter subscriptions and other actions that visitors might be taking when they land on your website.
For more information about conversion tracking with Google Analytics and other topics related to Internet marketing, you should visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You'll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.
Yes, you can make a simple change to your landing page, even to the color of a button and see drastic changes to your site's conversion rate. But how do you track your current conversions so that you know what's working and what needs tweaking? Well, fortunately for you, Google Analytics can do all of this and more for free. Let's look at how you can use GA to track your website's conversions:
After you have signed up for your Google Analytics account, you will get a tracking code that you will need to install on your website. If you are running a WordPress blog, there is a handy Google Analytics for WordPress plugin that you can install that makes adding the tracking code quite simple to install.
Using Google Analytics to track conversion rates
Step 1: Create a 'Thank You' page for the product that you are testing conversions for and copy and paste the URL for that new page into a Notepad file because you're going to need it soon.
Step 2: Using the Goal Tracking feature in Google Analytics
From within your website's profile in GA, click on the 'edit' button to the right of the link for your website.
You will be brought to the 'Profile Settings' page for your website, and if you scroll down just a little bit you will see a section called, 'Goals.' Google Analytics allows you to create up to 20 conversion goals for each website profile.
Click on the 'Add goal,' link.
Give your goal a name, such as the name of the product, and then under 'Goal Type,' choose 'URL Destination,'
Here is where you will put the link to the Thank you page that you created earlier. If the enter URL to that page is, http://mycoolblog.com/thank-you, then you would paste "/thank you/" as your goal URL.
It's as simple as that. Now you just have to wait a few days before you start seeing results because Google Analytics does not work in real time.
Now that you know how to set up basic goals using Google Analytics, you can set up goals to track newsletter subscriptions and other actions that visitors might be taking when they land on your website.
For more information about conversion tracking with Google Analytics and other topics related to Internet marketing, you should visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You'll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.