The benefits of conversion tracking goals in Google Analytics

In your role as a business owner, you may imagine that your company is in most need of SEO, paid search, social media marketing or perhaps a combination of the three.

However, whatever service you may initially enquire about, it’s difficult to avoid your conversations with agencies also turning to analytics.

Analytics play an imperative role in helping you to determine the performances of your campaigns. Fail to implement a rounded analytics strategy, and it may remain a mystery to you how certain visitor segments are faring, and therefore how you can adjust your campaign for success.

Why conversion goals are so important

So many businesses are intimidated by analytics, with its arcane terms like ‘event tracking’, ‘conversion goals’ and ‘multi-channel funnels’, to the point that they just place a tracking code on their homepage and go no further.

However, the most basic use of Google Analytics naturally has only limited usefulness. If you really want to gain the insights that will significantly boost your ROI from analytics, you will need to learn about conversion tracking goals.

This will allow you to analyse where your traffic is coming from, distinguishing between the more and less effective sources. With the performance data that can be generated from various analytics reports, you’ll be able to make decisions to significantly improve your campaigns.

It’s not just about direct revenue

It’s easy to presume that a conversion simply means a sale and the revenue that comes from it, but it’s vital to remember that there are many other ‘success events’ worth monitoring which, while not generating revenue directly, nonetheless have a big role in indirectly achieving sales.

Examples of such events range from the completion of a contact form, signing up to an email newsletter and clicks to your company social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter, to watching product videos and downloading product guides or specification documents.

Even such engagement goals as pages per visit and time on site can be invaluable, given their status as key drivers of revenue. It isn’t just the macro-conversion of a sale that is worth looking out for.

Don’t underestimate goal-setting

There are various goal types that you can choose from within Google Analytics, including URL destination, visit duration and pages per visit, which cover the various important actions that could be performed by your site visitors.

Talk to SEOLocal.co.uk today about how you can make the most of conversion tracking goals for your own next online marketing campaigns. With the most rounded analytics strategy, your website can soon be carving its way to a much stronger ROI.