Google Analytics is a great way to see how much website traffic you are getting but how do you track when someone has completed a specific action on your website?
With websites having to become more interactive, user friendly and ultimately quickly hook visitors in, many organisations are now investing time and money into conversion rate optimisation (CRO) – see our earlier blog explaining CRO.
It’s important to track and measure conversions, such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading a brochure, whitepaper or eBook, sending an enquiry form or signing up to a webinar. Without knowing this, you won’t be able to track conversion effectiveness and find opportunities to refine and improve your website.
To help optimise the performance of your website these conversions can be tracked in Google Analytics by setting up a goal. Goals in Google Analytics measure how often users complete specific actions. This video from Google provides a useful overview of goals.
So, how do they work?
Goals can be set to specific pages on your website, how many pages are viewed in a session, how long a visitor stays on your site and the actions taken whilst on a page. Goals can also be assigned a monetary value so that you can calculate how much that would be worth to the business.
There are four types of goals:
- Destination – where a page view is set as a goal such as ‘thank you for registering’.
- Duration – set by a specific amount of time such as 10 minutes spent on a page.
- Pages/Screens per session – a visitor views a certain number of pages.
- Event – this is an action such as a button click or video play.
This link from Google explains how to create, edit and share goals. Having goals set up will tell you if your website is actually helping to convert business.
Cal Partners is an award-digital marketing agency that can help you to set up and track conversions, as well as refine your website to optimise those conversions. Book your free consultation to see how we can help you.
About the author
Rachel Wright
Rachel is Head of Marketing Operations at Cal Partners and is a Chartered Marketer. She began working in marketing in 2007 and has a particular specialism in the professional services sector.
Marketing for Professional Services
Cal Partners
The go-to strategic marketing partner for ambitious professional services