Google Analytics' Goals and Funnels

Google Analytics gives business owners and marketers alike the ability to measure, track and analyze trends seen during visitors’ experience with their website. A goal conversion speaks for itself. It is the actual completion, the desirable outcome; of the goal business owners have set for their sites. An example would be obtaining subscribers to a weekly email newsletter. The conversion of this goal would be to get users to the “Thank you for signing up for our email newsletter” page. Google Analytics can track visits to this page (a page only accessible by signing up) and will translate them into a goal conversion rate—the percentage of visits to a site that resulted in a conversion to one of the set goals. Using GA to set this goal will not only track the number of goal conversions, but will ultimately bring business objectives to life.

For the Web Metrics for Dummies blog, the best Google Analytics goals to implement and analyze are: a) page visits, b) visitor duration and c) video views. I not only want to know how much traffic is being generated to my blog, but I want to know how long they are engaged on a post or all posts. I am also interested in seeing if the video clips are providing any incentive for people to watch and stay on the blog longer. These goals are newly added so only time will tell just how well the work for understanding visitors. 

Setting up such goals will allow me to measure conversions on this blog. A conversion occurs when a visitor accomplished a desired goal on a website. Goals can vary and can be as simple as viewing a specific page on a website or completing some type of process such as signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. By defining specific goals for a website or blog, the reach can be measured as well as the influence it has on people who come visit.

Once traffic is generated to an e-commerce website or a blog and measuring, managing and optimizing the traffic sources is in progress, attention should then be focused to the website or blog content. What page do site visitors arrive? Do they find the information they want when they get there? What steps are taken to measure this and improve site performance? Content should be changed based on results to better engage visitors.

Google Analytics’ funnels can go hand in hand with setting goals for conversion. Funnels may be implemented to capture the path that visitors are expected to take on their way to converting to the goal. Defining these pages would allow me to see how frequently visitors abandon goals, and where they go. This may help determine why people are exiting off the funnel and allow for changes to keep them on track. Multi-channel funnels imply a funnel that is entered from one of several different sources. This is much the way a visitor arrives at a website. They may get there via an organic search (on Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.), a paid search (clicking the paid ads on a page somewhere), or a referral from another source that links to the website (which could be a directory, a chamber of commerce, local association, or other source). The visitor could also come directly to the site (by typing in the address, clicking on a bookmark, etc., a link in an email, etc.).

“A website has a funnel, or perhaps a bunch of funnels, where you can measure what enters the top and leaves the bottom of the funnel. Entering your funnel would be your site visitors who, we’ve learned, come from search, referring links, emails, etc. What comes out of the funnel are leads, sales, newsletter registrations, v-card downloads or whatever you’ve created to advance your business proposition” (Salchli, 2012).

Perhaps, as owner of the blog, goals and funnels may reveal the following reasons for low RSS or email subscriber count: 

·               Slow loading time of the blog

·               Low frequency of fresh content

·               Badly positioned RSS subscribe button

·               No call to action for subscribing

  

The important thing here is that goals give numbers and values, so that businesses and/or bloggers can precisely measure the percent increase or decrease of the given business objective of concern. Most website goals are to generate more leads; however, visitors that become leads typically spend more time on a site and view more pages than those that do not. Businesses should think of time on site as a precursor to a lead. The more visitors hanging around a site for longer and longer periods of time, the better.

After goal values have been running for a number of weeks, there are nice graphs showing in the analytics package, but what can be done with the data? What would be the best thing to change first? Should it be testing a call to action since that has a clear connection to the bottom line?

If a rounded analytics strategy does not exist, then a business leader will not have a solid understanding of how campaigns perform.  In addition, if the important mechanisms are not in place to easily see how visitor segments perform, then important questions could go unanswered.  That is not good for enhancing website business. It is important to recognize that anything goal-related within Google Analytics involves the strategic direction of business objectives. Leveraging goals and conversions well with Google Analytics will lead to greater understanding of how people are experiencing a site and will help leaders make informed decisions on how sites should communicate. After all, it is not enough anymore to just have a website.

References

Salchli, F. (2012). Achieving Business Results With Google Analytics. Retrieved on December 3, 2012 from, http://www.duoconsulting.com/whitepapers/achieving-business-results-google-analytics.