Quick Tips: Using Goals & Funnels for Optimising Conversions
The amount of visitors on your website is always a good performance indicator but when it comes down to the real business end the ultimate goal is to have as many leads or sales as possible.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps by bringing in more traffic from ranking higher in search engine results, the next step is to optimise the way users navigate through your site and purchase your product. This is where the design and behavior tracking of you visitors plays its part.
Using Google analytics, site owners can set goals to track where users are leaving in the process. This is done by setting the goal URL that users land on after complete a transaction and specifying URLs leading up to that completion page. A sample set up is shown below with the resulting funnel output in analytics:
More complicated URLs can also be defined through head and regular expression matching parameters if they are generated dynamically or session based.
One thing to note is that the goal is only counted as complete when users follow these exact steps so any deviation in that process that also ends up with the user finishing on the /thankyou page will not be counted towards goal completion.
Once set up and enabled, the information within the goal funnel will provide a great insight to how users enter and leave your pages.
To the left and right (green and red arrows) of each step will show the number of people that landed and exited as well as a summary of the previous and next pages that they entered from and left to.
The vertical green arrows show the number of users that follow through to the next step.
So for example if during the Delivery Information step 100 users came in but only 10 went on to Payment Information we can see where the 90 other users went (red arrow and summary right of delivery information step) and tweak the process or design accordingly.
The goals are not limited to checkout processes, if you are aiming to lead your users down a path and want to measure how successfully it works setting goals also works a treat. Have a play around with it and feel free to share experiences or tips.
