Tracking Conversions with Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you see how well you’re doing at converting visitors to leads or sales. Let’s take a look at what you can measure and track.

Conversion Rate Calculation

If you have 100 site visitors and one sale or form submission, then you have a 1% conversion rate. You need various goals set up in order to track the conversion rate for things ranging from shopping cart sales to form submissions to how many people downloaded a PDF. You will also want to track your conversion rates from social media versus paid search versus organic search.

Goal Flow and Funnel Visualization

Goal Flow and Funnel Visualization are two of the reports in the “Goals” section of the Conversions menu. The Goal Flow report shows a visual representation of the goal completions and where those converting visitors came from, either by source, keyword, campaign, or other dimension.

The Funnel Visualization report simplifies reviewing a conversion funnel. You can determine at which page people are abandoning their shopping carts, and then use that information to improve the conversion process and save conversions/sales.

Multi-Channel Funnels

The Multi-Channel Funnels reports provide attribution information. When users view your site several times and come from different sources like Twitter, paid ads, organic, or a direct type-in, a conversion has only historically been tracked based on their last most recent click.

Google Analytics now shows every touch point a visitor had with the site in the 30 days prior to conversion. This allows you to give partial credit to a number of channels and therefore make better decisions on how to direct your ad spend. Unfortunately, these reports give you just 30 days of data, but they can help you to determine if, for example, organic search is “assisting” your paid search campaigns or hurting them.

Reverse Goal Path

This is one of my favorite reports. It shows you which pages users visited along the path to conversion, by showing you the pages leading up to a goal completion.

Once you see which pages are proven pathways to success, you can create additional experiences like this on your site.

Micro Conversions

Micro conversions are not as big as an actual sale or lead generation from someone filling out a form, but are small wins that you will want to track.

Event Tracking

Events can now be used as goals, so you can track events like PDF downloads and video views without affecting other metrics.

Tracking Video

You can set up reports on how many people watched and interacted with your video content. Interactive events such as pressing the play, pause, and rewind buttons, as well as the time spent watching, can all be tracked.