Google Analytics Tutorial 2021 – Understanding Conversions for Businesses and Ecommerce

Google Analytics Tutorial 2021 – Understanding Conversions for Businesses and Ecommerce

Without a good analytics strategy, you will not have a good understanding of how your campaign is performing. Besides that, you could miss important information on what your customers want. For any e-commerce site, that is bad for business. Every inch you gain over the competition is important in helping to keep you afloat. 

Understand that Conversion Goal 

Google analytics can be quite complex without the right guidance. You have so many things to consider such as filters, regular expressions, multi-channel funnels, and much more. To avoid all these things, some people simply slap on a tracking code as a Band-Aid solution. However, it can only get you so far. It will not be useful in helping you gain the insight you need to better your ROI. 

With this guide, you will gain insight in what strategies you can implement so that you can gain more insight about your customers. If you are serious about your e-commerce’s business success, you should read on. 

Understand Which Actions can Be Conversion Goals

Most people associate conversion with revenue. Thus, most people track conversions such as a sale. However, that is not the only thing you should track; it gives you limited insight about your customers. Some of the other things you can track on an e-commerce site are:

•    Completion of contact forms

•    Email subscriptions

•    Clicks to social networks

•    Time Spent on the page per visit

•    Products specs downloads

•    Live chat clicks

All of these factors are a good way to track conversion on your site. However, most e-commerce startups do not track these goals. That is quite bad since all of these things contribute significantly to the revenue the business earns. For instance, some e-commerce sites attribute email marketing to helping boost their revenue. Thus, any source that leads to more email conversions should be capitalized upon. 

Understand Conversion Goal Types

 Google Analytics gives you four goal types. Read on to understand how it can help you track success event of your e-commerce business. 

1.    Visit duration 

It is an engagement goal type. A conversion is triggered after visitors spend a certain period on your site. 

2.    Pages per Visit

It is another engagement goal that is triggered when visitors go to a certain number of pages on the site. You can define the number based on what you intend to track. 

3.    URL Destination

This one is triggered when visitors go to a certain page on the site. A good example is when a person gets a purchase confirmation screen after submitting a purchase form. 

4.    Event 

The event is triggered after any specific action that you define on the site. The event can be a download, viewing a video, clicking on a specific button and much more. It opens up many opportunities if you are trying to gain as much insight as you can about you visitors. 

How Conversion Goals can Improve Your Analysis

You can use it to view conversion by the source of traffic. This information can be accessed by clicking on the Goal set Tabs. Having identified the value of each traffic source, you can then drill down to the details. 

The Google Analytics’ Goal Set Tabs

For example, if you want to gain insight into the organic search results, you can view the conversion based on the keywords, organic search landing pages, by the different search engines and more. If you drill even more, you can view conversion by the referring URL. Additionally, you can see traffic sources by keyword, ad content, or destination URL. 

Conversion Data by Traffic Source

Conversion data by traffic source is quite valuable. However, it only covers the basics of the insight you can gain. You can view many other details such as mobile traffic, new vs. returning visitors, location, and much more.  

When you set up conversion goals, you will view conversion data from varied sources. By gaining insight on how different segments are influencing your conversion, you can do a lot to boost your sales. 

Important Point to Consider for Google Analytics

If you feel confident about hitting Google Analytics, here are some important pointers for you:

•    Always filter internal traffic so that it does not impact your conversion data. 

•    Each conversion goal is triggered once per session. It is important in helping to avoid skewed data from a single visitor who reaches a goal multiple times. 

•    When you make changes to your reporting, add some annotations. It is especially so when you are trying to compare different periods. 

•    Create a new profile when you want to add conversion goals. It helps to leave the original data unadulterated. 

•    Ensure that each campaign is tagged accurately. It is important in helping to disentangle the sources of your traffic.

Why Conversion Goals are Important

By understanding and quantifying different conversion goals, it can help you gain insight on the performance of various segments. You can start your journey today. Discuss with your team about what you want to achieve and begin. Implement them and begin getting the data you need. In a short time, you will find that you improve the site’s ROI.