For local businesses, and most non e-commerce websites, tracking the success of the website depends on the people answering the phone calls to inquire “How did you hear about us?” This system leaves a lot of room for error and doesn’t help us figure out how the new customers found the website. Was it from searching a specific keyword, browsing an online directory, or some other website?
Google Analytics allows you to specify a specific page on your website as a “completed goal”. So it will track each web visitor and if they visit the page you have specified as a goal, it will count that as a conversion. A goal completion page could be the thank you page for a contact form, or an email sign up. It could also be a page where you download and print a coupon. Coupon downloads are a great way to track success as well as remind your client how successful their website is.
Tracking goal conversion rates is important in deciding which referral sites might be worth spending more or less with. For example the conversion rate for Bing searches is over 15% so it might be worth looking at the website rankings in Bing and trying get more visits from there. This data is also compiled for each keyword search so you can use this data to increase and decrease spending on certain keywords in your Google Adwords campaign.
Some ideas for goals are
- Newsletter Sign ups – Each time someone subscribes to your mailing list send them to a unique thank you page that you track as a goal.
- Contact Forms – Make a unique thank you page for each contact form on your website and make it a goal.
- New Customer Discount – New customers are what we are after, and carry tremendous value if they continue to use your service. Offer them a 10% discount or some other incentive that they can download from your website.
- Downloadable offers and coupons – Student discounts, major purchase discount, valued customer discount, referral rewards etc.
