Track Conversion With Google Analytics

What is conversion?

Conversion has to do with the most desired action you want your website visitors to perform. E-commerce websites’ goal is for the visitors to complete a shopping cart process, and make the payment. A community websites’ goal is for the visitors to register as members. A content websites’ goal is to make sure their visitors leave down their email address for newsletter subscription. Different website has different goals. But the definition of conversion stays the same. It is the ultimate goal of your website, to convert website visitors into ’something’ other than merely visitors.

Keeping track on the conversion rates

Google Analytics’ strength lies in the ability on tracking visitors’ behavior, this includes how well they convert. But before that, you have to define a goal in the website setting first. You need to obtain the URL in which the visitors complete the final action. It can be a ‘thank you’ page, or a ’sign up completion’ page.

In your Google Analytics interface, go to Settings->Edit, and key in the URL under “Conversion Goals and Funnel“.

To track the result, go to ‘Marketing Optimization’->’Marketing Campaign Result’ on the Google Analytics Report page. G1/visits tell you how many visitors (in percentage) complete the first goal and vice versa. Source conversion gives you the statistic on every visitors source to your website. Medium conversion divides the source into referral, direct, paid search and organic search. Referral conversion provides an in depth look into websites that refer traffic to you, comparing all the pages of the particular referral website.

Google Analytics also can track how well ‘keywords‘ convert compare to one another. The ‘keywords’ here mean the query your visitors type in the search engine. Under ‘Marketing Optimization‘ -> ‘Search Engine Marketing‘, you can see it under ‘Overall Keyword Conversion‘, and compare CPC and organic results under ‘CPC vs Organic Conversion‘.

Optimize your advertising campaign

Tracking conversion represents the biggest advantage online advertising have over the traditional media (TV, newspaper, radio). It allows you to know which campaigns are doing well down to the smallest detail (which page or which keyword convert the best). Once you have these data, allocate the marketing budget accordingly, put the money into source that converts and take away from those that don’t.

What about your experience on tracking conversion with Google Analytics?