For years, businesses have been happy to just run with tracking pageviews, visitors and that is plenty to see how much traffic you’re getting and how important it is, right? Well, no actually, it’s not! If you want to find out if you website actually helps your business, then you need to know key metrics such as Leads, Signups, Downloads etc… even if your site doesn’t have an obvious ‘goal’, you can still get a much deeper understanding of your visitors if you set up these goals. And, if nothing else, it helps you as a business to focus your mind on what you want your website to do for you.
Today we’ll be showing you HOW to track this sort of data and what steps you need to take to set up goals and conversions.
In Google Analytics, you have four different ways to track your goals:
URLs
Dwell Time
Pages/Visit
Events
Let’s get started. Today we’ll cover URL Goals. But where do I find goals I hear you cry. Well, here’s a quick step by step:
1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Find your account (if you have multiple accounts you can select from the left hand side)
3. Click the Admin Cog Icon
4. Click on Goals in the right hand menu
Now you’re here, it’s time to set up your first goal. I usually recommend the first goal for almost all clients is a URL destination goal. So go ahead and give your goal a name. Then choose URL Destination from the list. Set your URL (for us, it’s /contact/) and that’s about it.
You can assign monetary value to this goal, but for now, you probably just want to see how many people have hit your contact page and achieved the ‘goal’ you set up.
Once you know your goals, you can start to work out how efficient your website is. A great example of this is to look at how many people view your site, and then cross reference that with how many people land on your contact page. Once you have that data, cross reference again with how many cold-contacts you’ve had through the site and you can start to get a good idea of your conversion rate.
Once you have all of that data, you can tailor your website to suit your needs. For instance, if you get a high goal rate but fewer contacts than you’d expect, maybe you need to redesign your contact page? However, if nobody hits that contact page, then perhaps you aren’t funnelling people in the right way.
Great data and analytics go a long way!
If you’re a business with a website that isn’t quite performing for you, or perhaps you don’t have a website yet, then please get in touch. As an agency specialising in Web Design Leicester, Cambridge and Peterborough, we can be on hand to help you get the most out of your digital presence.