Funnels, Conversion, and Google Analytics Goals

By Shan Pesaru / Sharp Hue / Springdale

A well designed website encourages visitors to take action: make purchases, sign up for a newsletter, subscribe to a blog. Your site should funnel visitors smoothly toward completion of these actions, without frustrations or distractions.

Is your website doing its job? The first step in building a better funnel is to find out what your visitors are doing now. The Google Analytics “goals” function makes this easy.

Google Analytics measures the success of goals by tracking when readers visit a particular page: the “thank you” page after they place an order or leave contact information, for example.

You can set up as many as four goals for one Google Analytics website profile, and each goal can have up to ten steps. These steps are called a “funnel” because they narrow visitors from those who are browsing, those interested in your products or services, and those actually ready to make a purchase.

When you add these steps to your analytics goal, you can see when potential shoppers leave, and you can adjust your web site accordingly. For example, if your shoppers visit the catalog, put items in their cart, and enter their credit card information, but leave at the shipping screen, then there must be something about the experience at this screen that is losing you customers. If plenty of visitors make it to your product information, but few go on to the sign up page, then the product information page may need changes.

It was exactly this type of information that led to the development of Sharp Hue’s Visual Cart e-commerce system. By analyzing the experiences clients had with their e-commerce solutions, we were able to design a very smooth experience adaptable to many different business goals. You can use the same kind of data to fine-tune the parts of your visitors’ experiences that are specific to your web site.

The goals function at Google Analytics also allows you to discover which pages of your web site inspire visitors to take action. You can tell which of your pages helped your visitors make up their minds. You can see which keywords led to browsing and which led to conversion.

You can even set up your goals using dollar amounts. Assigning dollar goals allows you to keep track of the return on your investment. You can compare the value of your newsletter to that of your blog, or of visitors who reach your web site in different ways. Knowing whether your pay-per-click (PPC) visitors bring in enough value to justify a PPC campaign compared with an e-mail campaign, for example, allows you to allocate your marketing dollars to best advantage. If a redesign of your web site or a change in your newsletter would increase the rate at which your subscribers converted to customers, it would be worth the investment. Seeing your goals in dollar amounts can help with these decisions.

Author / expert Shan Pesaru has more than 12 years of web development experience. He is founder of Sharp Hue, a web design, web hosting, web marketing company working to stay ahead of the industry curve, and continuously revolutionize the industry. He can be reached at shan@sharphue.com.