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.

Determine conversions: the car dealer in 2000 and now

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:

• Online store: online sales, create profile, start ordering process, place article in shopping basket, view delivery information, view product page, repeat visit.
• Service provider (hairdresser, accountant, garage): make an appointment, view our page, download the brochure, contact us, subscribe to the newsletter.
• Online blog: newsletter subscription, Like Facebook page, Share blog post, Session time, Time on page, Number of pages visited per session, Bouncerate, Repeat visit.

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.

Google Analytics goals

Still not clear on your conversion goals?
Then look at the conversion options that Google Analytics sees:

REVENUE

• Reservations: Registered for tour, rental or reservation
• Make a payment: Online payment completed
• Make an appointment: A visit or meeting planned
• Become a partner: Information about partners or dealers requested or submitted

ACQUISITION

• Create an account: Registration completed, account or data view created

ASK

• View more: View product or service details
• Contact: Telephone number, route description, chat or e-mail address viewed
• Get estimate: Estimation of required price or time requested
• View availability: Inventory or planning checked
• Find a location: Information about locations or dealers viewed

INVOLVEMENT

• Play media: Interactive media played, such as a video, slide show or product demo
• Adjusted (to be filled in yourself)

Measuring conversions in Google Analytics

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:

• Destination for example: thank you.html
• Expensive e.g.: five minutes or more
• Pages / screens per session for example: three pages
• Event eg: a video played. For this, Google Analytics needs input for Category, Action, Label and Value. (read more)

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.

Set destination as conversion in Google Analytics

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.

Before you get started in Google Analytics

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!

1. Go to Google Analytics, click on All Website data of the relevant website, Administrator at the top, and in the View column, click Goals. 
2. click on New Purpose.
   
   
3. Give in Target configuration which conversion is involved. Click Continue.
4. Give in Target description the name, possibly an ID (follow-up number in Google Analytics), and the Type. Enter as Type Destination and click Continue.
5. Only specify the share URL of your landing page, for example: /thank you for your request/. Optionally add a Value and a Funnel (pages visited before)
6. Does this landing page exist for longer than a moment and have conversions already been made on it? click on Verify this goal.
7. click on Save.

Your goal has been created in Google Analytics and you can now follow it in the reports. Do this for all your goals.

Tracking conversions in Google Analytics

You now measure your conversion goals in Google Analytics. Fun. And then? Let's play ball!

Which traffic will give you something

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.

Determine your traffic bet

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:

• Google - organic often generates the most traffic and the most conversions;
• A newsletter provides a relatively high conversion rate;
• Facebook and Twitter often provide little direct conversion, but again assisted conversions.
• Referals varies enormously; but usually it doesn't deliver much.
• Google Ads and Facebook Ads greatly depend on the method of deployment. This is often a matter of professional deployment.

Which pages are important?

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.

• sort on Achieved goals and you see which page yields you the most in numbers;
• sort on Target Conversion Rate, and you see which pages have the highest conversion rates.
• Care for more traffic on pages with a high conversion rate: that gives you the most.
• Improve the conversion rate on pages with a low conversion rateespecially if it number of sessions high is.

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!