All of us want to grow our business online. I love the fact that Google gives us so many different tools that we use on a daily basis. These tools have literally changed the way we work in our day to day lives.
You would have experienced these in your own life:
- If you don’t know the meaning of something? What do you do? You google it
- Want to use a secure emailing solution for free? What do you do? You use gmail.com
- Want to view a song and its video? What do you do? You go on Youtube (owned by google)
- Want to travel somewhere and want to see how long will it take to reach there? What do you do? You check out Google Maps!
It is amazing to realize how one company has really made our lives so much better and they keep coming up with new innovations to help us more.
One such tool that helps website owners all across the world is “Google Analytics”. It helps you track all the visitors that are visiting your website. It tracks a lot of things such as:
- The geographical location exact down to the particular city from where they have reached your website
- Different pages they visit on your website
- Number of pages they viewed
- How long did they stay on the site
- Which particular source/channel referred them to your website and many more
What is the one simple FREE trick that you can use to grow your online business?
The trick is to use the amazing FREE feature called Goal Setting in Google Analytics since this helps you in measuring conversions. The first step to improve anything is measuring it. Once you start measuring the conversions on your website, based on the results, you can analyze the results and then improvise your marketing strategy.
If you are interested in knowing more about conversions, You can check out this article about What are conversions and how to measure conversions?
You can use Goal Setting in Google Analytics for FREE and start measuring how many visitors are getting converted. What does this cool feature do? It actually lets you create Goals and these goals can automatically track conversions on your website. The only thing you have to do is spend a few minutes of your time in setting them up.
But the question is, Why do you need to set them up?
How Goal Setting in Google Analytics can help you grow your online business?
To understand the answer to above questions, let us first understand what will happen if we do not set up goals?
If you will not set up goals in google analytics, then:
You will get to know how many visitors are visiting your website but you will not get to know how many of them were interested in making an online purchase or how many of them were interested in doing business with you.
You will get to know the various pages that they are visiting, the time they are spending on your website, but you can miss out on knowing about extremely important metrics such as:
- How many people clicked on add to cart button and how many of them missed out on making the final purchase?
- How many people are interested in getting educated about your products or services by signing up for your different offers?
- Are there any leads that are getting converted? If yes, which particular contact forms are being used for those leads?
If you do not look at these metrics closely, you might not be able to address your customer’s needs appropriately. This might result in those visitors leaving your website. If you want to understand more about why your customers leave your website, check this article to find out.
Just to give you an example, see the below image:
It contains the number of leads that a sample website gets from different contact forms. Till the time, there is no measurement, the website owner only gets to know the total number of leads she is getting from the website. It is only when she starts to measure leads coming in from different contact forms, that she realizes that contact form 3 is giving her the maximum leads.
Now, once she has this information, she can analyze it and take better business decisions. This measurement can easily be done through automatically setting up goals in google analytics.
Goals can give you powerful insights about the activity of users on your website.
Similarly, if you can start measuring different aspects of your website which are important for your business, you would be able to understand which are the aspects that are performing poorly or which are doing well. Based on these insights, you would be able to realize different areas that need your attention.
For example, if you have a landing page and you are spending money on promotional advertisements to bring visitors to the landing page, you can use goal setting on different aspects of the landing page, so that you are able to understand what do your users do after reaching the landing page:
- How much time do visitors spend on the page?
- Do they will the inquiry form?
- Do they click on any video testimonials?
This will help you in understanding your visitors more effectively. Once you understand your visitors, you can provide a better user experience to them on the website and you can post more relevant content for them. All these decisions will help you in strategizing in a much better way and in turn can help you in getting more business.
Different examples to show – How can different type of websites benefit from Goal Setting in Google Analytics?
Different type of websites can have different requirements and therefore, their conversions need to be measured differently.
An ecommerce website – The main objective can be – To receive more number of orders online
A Business to Business website – The main objective can be – To receive more number of leads online
A content based website – The main objectives can be – To get more number of subscribers, to get higher engagements such as more comments, sharing of content etc.
Therefore, To understand this better, let us take examples of different types of websites and how they might have different type of goals. Let us consider different type of websites and what type of goals they might require:
Example 1: An Ecommerce Website
Example: A website that sells beachwear products online.
Goal Examples:
- How many people clicked on “Place Order” or Add to Cart
- How many people read product reviews
Example 2: A corporate website ‘B’ that deals in providing business to business products which might need customization
For example – A company that manufactures Espresso Coffee machines and their B2B business is selling coffee machines to customers that are Cafe owners who sell coffee and other products directly to consumers.
Such type of a company may not want to provide a fixed cost for the product since they might offer customized pricing based on their prospects requirements. Therefore, in such a scenario, they will want Leads in the form of name, contact number, email id instead of directly mentioning price of product on their website.
Goal Examples:
How many people click on:
- Contact Us
- Get Callback
- Live Chat
Example 3: An Affiliate website
An affiliate website is a website that contains different articles which compare different products. Such websites educate customers about pros and cons of using different products. The website earns money through commissions earned by referring customers to different product websites. For Example: A fitness website that recommends different protein or nutritional supplements by mentioning reviews of different products. Therefore, referring the customers to Amazon to purchase those nutritional supplements.
If you did not know about this, then this is something which is fairly common online. A lot of people and companies earn money online by doing this.
Goal Examples:
How many people click on:
- Compare Information
- Share / Social Connect
- Sign up to Newsletter
- Media Play (in case the comparisons are in video format)
Now that you know about such an important trick, it is time to put it to good use. Please feel free to write below in the comments section about your opinion on this article.
i shud start goal setting in analytics. thanks