Google funnels, filters and goals are an easy way to track how people are behaving on your website. This of course applies not only to e-commerce sites, but blogs and review sites alike. We all have goals and desired actions on our sites, whether it be a blog or a retail site. Recently on this new blog, I have been looking at how these parameters work and evaluating how they can be useful to everyone.
To start off, let’s take a look at the different types of funnels that you may be using depending on your website:
“A conversion funnel is a series of web pages which you expect your visitors to follow to complete a non-transactional goal like ‘newsletter signups’, ‘downloads’ etc.
A sales funnel is a series of web pages which you expect your visitors to follow to complete a transactional goal like placing an order on the website. Checkout process is a good example of a sales funnel” (Sharma, 2012).
For a website like mine, I will mainly be looking for people to subscribe to my blog. The process isn’t complicated and does not have very many steps. However, for sites that have a more involved process, creating a funnel through Google Analytics will help you not only understand your readers’ behavior but also how to increase revenue by making improvement to specific pages on your site.
We have all heard about marketing and sales funnels in classes and in our jobs. The ideas have been around for so long that they have to be outdated, right? Well, sort of. They have evolved and shifted to relate more closely to the modern marketing and sales processes. Funnels, as they relate to website behavior can come in many different forms. They do not necessarily need to follow the traditional sales funnel.
Samantha Stanley demonstrates what you should look for when choosing goals to track (2013):
- URL destination - When you setup an URL destination goal, a visitor must view a defined URL, such as your About Us page, to fulfill the goal. This metric helps you track the effectiveness of key landing pages.
- Time On Site - Say your goal for the month is to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your website from :30 seconds to 2 minutes. This metric shows how well your information captures visitor’s attention.
- Page/Visit - This goal is completed when visitors view a defined number of web pages in one visit. A higher number means site visitors are engaged and that your content is drawing them down the funnel to take action.
- Event - This is probably one of the most important goals for content marketers. An event goal can be set up to track when people complete actions such as clicking a social sharing button, subscribing to your blog or submitting a form.
Now that we understand what types of tracking we can do through GA, let’s look at an example. Let’s say that you want to track URLs. You know that you want people to buy a specific product from your website so you decide to create a funnel on GA that reflects this process. We know that the information provided by funnels and goals on Google Analytics is astounding. But how do you know if you are setting up your funnel and goals correctly?
First of all, you should think through exactly how you would want customers to do. Imagine a person walking into your brick and mortar bookstore. What are our goals once a customer is inside the store? Initially, we would want them to pick up a book. We can consider this the same as a person viewing a product page on your e-commerce site. Our next step would be for the person to put the book into their basket and show intention to purchase it. This would be equivalent to a person clicking “Add to Shopping Cart” on your website. Next, you would want the customer to bring the book to the register, or “Checkout” on your website. These page URLs would be the different steps in your funnel with the final goal being the “Thank You” page on your website.
What can we learn from this information? We can discover how many people are entering the funnel as well as how many people we are losing by the end. The more steps we add to the funnel, the more we are able to see where exactly we are losing potential customers. Take a look at the image below. This demonstrates the drop off for a site that requires customers to sign in before between the “Add to Shopping Cart” and “Checkout” steps. Requiring them to do so forces about 18% of people to abandon the whole process.
In addition to this type of loss, you may notice a large drop off people after they have tried to checkout but never reached the “Thank you” page that comes up after the sale. What can we do about this, or other funnel issues that we may find? For the first issue demonstrated in the image above we can look at what the Sign-In page looks like. Is it too complex? Does it allow people to continue to check out as a guest customer? If not, doing so may decrease the number of drop off in the step. If we find that people are dropping off before completing the payment page, we should look at what may be discouraging them. Is the page clear and simple? Are we asking too many unnecessary questions (like asking for a mobile AND home phone number)?
Setting up your funnels, filters and goals is only the first step. Then, you must make sure that you are actually checking what steps seem to be hindering your revenue stream. Once you’ve identified the problem pages, act like a customer. Try and go through the process as a customer, and not the seller. Doing so will provide you with the insight you need to get more customers completing your goals!
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