The first step towards optimizing your conversion rate is to accurately measure and successfully interpret your website’s analytics. You must learn and understand as much as you can about these visitors and how they are interacting with your website.
Who Are Your Visitors?
In our previous blog post, we provided an introduction to conversion rates and conversion marketing. And while both are important tools to utilize, they don’t even begin to paint a complete picture of how your visitors are interacting with your website. For instance, are your customers not fully engaging with your website’s calls-to-action? Or are you able to convert desktop users, but not mobile users, or vice versa? In order to improve your conversion marketing plan, you must first understand a few important facts about who is visiting your website, the devices they are using, and what pages and elements of your website are getting the most attention.
Google Analytics
One of the most widely-used web analytics tools is Google Analytics. Both the free basic service and fee-based premium service allows website owners and administrators to track very specific statistical measurements and usage patterns of their website visitors. For example, the basic universal package lets you measure your audience behavior, mobile and desktop statistics, your top landing pages and much more.
A Quick GA Overview
Once you have signed up for Google Analytics, you must begin by specifically defining what conversion goals you want the service to track. Once you have defined these goals, Google Analytics can begin tracking the number of actual conversions that take place. If your goal is to measure the conversion rate of visitors that complete an online account registration, you can easily track the URL of the final confirmation page. The service can even measure the actual value of your conversions if you attach a specific monetary value to each conversion. You can also label each goal with a unique name and choose a specific goal type, such as a URL destination, time on site, or pages/visit.
Sifting through Data
Google Analytics provides additional reports that can be utilized to help optimize conversion marketing, including visitor location, language, web browser and operating system, mobile device type, and site search usage. By sifting through this data and comparing it to the results of your conversion goals, you can start to better craft and manage your calls-to-action and conversion marketing plans.