When monitoring your website performance, the success of the SEO and the return on investment you get on your website it is important to be able to work out exactly what you are getting back from the website.
We’ve talked about conversions before on our blog with posts about your online forms, making the sale and conversions in PPC but one of the often forgotten elements of tracking on your website is knowing how many conversions you have achieved.
The first part of this process is making sure that every action on your website has a conclusion such as a “thank you for your enquiry” page or an order confirmation page. Tracking the page on your website which has the form on it won’t give you a good idea of how many people have gone on to complete the form. The Confirmation or thank you pages page should be set up as a standalone page, and preferably there should be one for every action on the website. So if you have a brochure request, a newsletter signup and an online shop there should be a thank you page for the brochure request, another one for the newsletter signup and another one for the confirmation of orders received.
Creating these separate pages will enable you to track each conversion so at the end of each month you can see how many orders, brochure requests and newsletter signups you have, rather than a combined number with no differentiation between types of conversions.
If your website has Google Analytics installed you can track these individual confirmation pages in your stats by using goals. A simple goal in Google Analytics will show you the number of times a unique page has been viewed and using this you can set up one goal per action on your website.
From screens like the “Traffic Sources” screen you can also then track the number of visits you get from a particular place – allowing you to see how many signups or orders you have achieved from your SEO and how many have come through from direct visits. This is a great way of seeing from what source people tend to want to interact with your website.
You can also track keywords which lead to conversions, allowing you to see which keywords people use most when they want to contact you. This can be done for either PPC or SEO keywords, so this also gives you an interesting comparison of which keywords work for one and not the other.
So make sure your website has a conversion page on it and that you have set these pages up as goals in Google Analytics.
Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager
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