Is your website working for you? How do you know? Setting and measuring specific goals are essential for tracking and improving your site’s success. While page ranking on search engines is one basic element for success, it is not the only one. A high ranking boosts visibility, exposure and traffic — but what happens once visitors find your site? Do they become customers or share your site with new prospects?
Google Analytics, and more specifically its Goals tool, can help you answer those questions. Analytics is a free app from Google that gives website owners information about site visitors. Examples are how visitors found the site (where they came from: search engine, social media, 3rd party link, etc.), pages they viewed most frequently and how long they stayed on the site.
Within Analytics, the Goals tool takes this one step further — to measure how often visitors take or complete specific actions.
Which actions you want to measure with this tool will depend on what you want your website to do for you. Add newsletter subscribers? Generate leads? Convert interest into sales?
In order for “Goals” to collect data on these types of actions, you must specify what you want the tool to measure. Consider what you created your site to do. What is its mission? “Goals” identifies three main categories:
- Conversions (sales)
- Leads (submission or contact forms completed)
- User behavior (page views, downloading a file, social shares, etc.)
When you’ve identified the goals/actions you want measured for your website, follow this link to instructions for specifying your goals within your Google Analytics account.
Once you’ve completed the set-up, Google Analytics “Conversion” reports will provide data to help you make smart marketing decisions for your business. For example, you can learn what sites are sending you the best converting traffic — which may justify increasing your investment in those referring sites. Conversely, you can consider cutting back on dollars and time invested in sites that do not send visitors who take action.
While having 20,000 monthly site visitors may sound impressive, it does not automatically lead to business success. Use the Google Analytics Goals tool to measure the number of visitors who take the desired action on your site, and you will have the information needed to increase your success online.
For more information on this topic, check out these links:
http://www.smartinsights.com/google-analytics/google-analytics-setup/10-goals-b2b-website/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2251882/How-to-Configure-Track-Google-Analytics-Goals-for-SEO
If you have questions about identifying or setting up goals to be measured, please contact us. We are here to help your website work most effectively for you.
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