Tracking Conversions with Google Analytics: A Guide to Optimizing Your Digital Marketing
How to Use Google Analytics to Track Conversions
Tracking conversions can be a powerful strategy to use in digital marketing. It helps businesses uncover new and better ways to optimize their website for more business growth.
Getting started with google analytics track conversions may seem daunting at first due to the many options available. However, with a bit of understanding, it’s easy to make your google analytics work for you.
1. Form Submissions
Form submissions are a key indicator of lead generation and the success of marketing campaigns. Many websites use forms to gather customer data and convert them into sales or leads.
Using the Google Analytics conversion tracking method, you can track your forms’ success rate and understand what marketing channels are working best for you.
With this method of conversion tracking, you create a destination goal in Google Analytics that triggers when the form sends a submit request to the website. Once the goal is created, head over to your Real Time reporting and check if it triggered correctly. You can identify this by looking for a 1 next to your goal in the Active Users report. You can also test the goal by filling out a form and clicking submit to see if the event is recorded in the goal.
2. Email Subscriptions
Email tracking is an essential component of any online marketing strategy. It provides valuable insights into what subscribers enjoy, what calls to action they click on and more. But until recently, there was a gap in the information available between an email campaign and what happened on your website.
To bridge this gap, create a custom goal in Google Analytics to track every new subscriber that comes from your site. Simply enter the URL of a page on your website that welcomes new subscribers (i.e. /thankyou or /subscriber-success) into the “Goal destination” box in the Goal setup screen. Once you have your goal set up you’ll begin to see data within 24 hours. Seeing this data in the same place as your other website analytics makes it much easier to make informed decisions.
3. Purchases
Most people will likely convert to a customer at some point, and tracking their journey across your website is crucial. Purchases can be tracked in Google Analytics as a ‘revenue’ goal, and they can also be broken down by source and medium, allowing you to understand the sites and channels that are driving conversions.
When setting up a purchase goal in Google Analytics, you need to set up both a Destination Goal and an Engagement Event. Using the utm_campaign parameters, you can then link these goals to your Ads account to import conversion data. The advantage of this method is that you’ll get data about both ‘hard’ conversions (like purchases) and softer ones (like engagement). However, it can be more complicated to install than other methods.
4. Live Chat
If your website has a live chat feature, you can use Google Analytics to track conversions. You’ll need to set up both Destination Goals (like a signup form) and Engagement Events (like video views).
For example, you can create a conversion that counts when someone clicks on your chat widget or visits the chat page. This allows you to see how many people are using your chat feature and if there are any areas for improvement.
Conversion tracking is crucial for marketers and website owners of all kinds. But it’s especially useful for those who rely on performance marketing or have an ecommerce website. To make sure you’re getting the most out of your Google Analytics account, check out our tips for improving it.
5. Video Views
Many businesses know that adding a video to their landing page can increase conversions, but how do they tell whether or not their visitors watch the video? Without a tracking solution, they’ll never know.
To get started, set up a new goal in Google Analytics, selecting “Video Views” as the action and choosing the corresponding metric from the drop-down menu. You can also customize the goal settings and add any other relevant information (like a description of the type of video being watched).
Then head over to the Explore section in Google Analytics and check out your new report! You’ll be able to see the total number of views as well as other data like time spent watching, average engagement, and more. You can use this data to identify your most popular videos and analyze how they’re performing.