Scoring with Google Analytics: Set conversion goals

Google Analytics. Many people immediately think of the many lost hours they have spent on it. And that final conclusion: you can do a lot with it, hey. But without action you have nothing to gain from insights. If you do not have time to constantly improve your website, because you are already overflowing with work, then do not do it. Do you want to get more out of your website? Read on.
In this article I assume that you have already installed Google Analytics on your website. Don't know if Google Analytics is running correctly? Go to Google Analytics, click on All Website data of the relevant website, Administrator at the top, and in the Property column, click Tracking info / Tracking code. State here Receive data? Then Google Analytics runs well. Click here for other notifications.
Advisable to Google Analytics open immediately when you continue reading.
In 2000 we visited the car dealer on average 7.6 times before we bought a car. That is now 1.6 times. The need for information has not diminished: we now simply get it online. So when are you happy with a result on your website? That differs per company. For a Online store is that an online sale. That is an appointment for a car dealer. For a software company that is a demo. Not every conversion gives you immediate revenue. Interaction is often an important step towards that turnover: in the case of the car dealer it is therefore equal to six visits. A few examples of conversions that you can measure:
Look in which category your company falls. When does your site really deliver? Then see which small steps lead to it that you can also measure. These are your conversion goals.
Still not clear on your conversion goals?
Then look at the conversion options that Google Analytics sees:
REVENUE
ACQUISITION
ASK
INVOLVEMENT
To set up your conversions, Google Analytics needs a measuring point: a counter that registers an event that Google Analytics returns as a successful conversion. There are four options for this:
The first three speak for themselves, Event is a bit more complex and will not apply to most readers. In front of Expensive give you the time in hours, minutes and seconds and before Pages / screens per session enter a number. Bee Destination enter a URL and you can also assign a value (in Euros) and possible pages that are visited for it. For example: the contact page before the thank you page.
Before you start, you need a URL as a measurement point. Therefore, create a separate thank you page for your contact form ... which is not indexed and is on nofollow. Otherwise your visitors will find this page via Google and your measurement is incorrect. So you want Google to thank this thank you page not finds.
Do you use the Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress? Then set this under your page with the Advanced tab, set 'Meta Robots' index to 'noindex' and 'Meta Robots' follow to Nofollow.
Unfortunately, you cannot delete goals when Google Analytics is on and data is collected. So don't add tests, but only real goals that you want to measure. Up to 20 goals are possible per website. Clearly? Go!
Your goal has been created in Google Analytics and you can now follow it in the reports. Do this for all your goals.
You now measure your conversion goals in Google Analytics. Fun. And then? Let's play ball!
Go to Report at the top, in the left column Acquisition, All Traffic, Source / Medium. See columns, here you can add the conversion goals to the right.
You then see the conversion rate per goal ("goal conversion rate"), the number of conversions ("goals achieved") and the total value ("goal value"). In short: what exactly do you get from various online marketing efforts? Does Google Ads, Facebook Ads, the newsletter, that paid link, SEO, Twitter or Facebook make sense, in terms of conversion? Click in the column at the top for example on "achieved goals" to see which channel gives you the most or least in numbers of conversions.
Before you determine something: have you added all the goals?
Go to Report at the top, in the left column Conversions, Attribution, Utilities. You can see here the last traffic source from which the conversions took place. But. Sometimes. People visit your website multiple times. First via SEO, then via Facebook, then again via SEO. Then under Source / medium you only see what SEO says as a traffic source that resulted in a conversion. But Facebook also had a role. How do you see that? Good that you ask, because that is important.
Go to Report at the top, in the left column Conversions, Multi-channel funnels, Assisted Conversions. Here you can see per type of traffic (“MFC channel group”), per medium or per source or per source / medium (best choice), the support of a conversion (“assisted conversion”) and the conversions in which this source / medium last traffic source was ("last click or direct conversions").
Is there nothing about assisted conversion and nothing about last click or direct conversions? Then that traffic source means nothing to you in terms of conversion. Does that traffic source cost money? Seeing how you can improve or remove it, you can put that money on something that works.
General observations:
And which pages can you improve and use more often as a destination for your traffic channels? Go to Report at the top, in the left column Behaviour, Site Content, Landing pages. Now you see all the important pages on your website, sorted by number of sessions. On the right you can also sort the list again by Goal Conversion Rate, Goals Achieved and Goal Value.
Of course you can learn much more in Google Analytics and also link actions to it. But if you have gone through the above, you should already have enough action points. Action points focused on more conversion. Good luck!
A question that I get regularly: how do you give someone access to Google Analytics? And…
giveaway by Learnit Do you already use Google Analytics but would like to…
Matt Cutts works as head of the Google webspam team. He regularly answers questions from ...
Ask? Comments? Give your reaction: