Wise Startup Blog

In this economy, smart businesses are focusing on increasing the amount of money they make on their current clients, whether it be focusing on re-orders or increasing average order value, for emarketers, it means increasing your conversion rate on your site.

Increase Conversion Rates With Goals

If you’re not using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your site, get that installed immediately.

Using GA you can easily track your daily visitors, unique visitors, pageviews, top pages, etc. but without actually diving deeper into the pages and specific conversion funnels, you’re only at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to GA’s usefulness.

Using GA’s goals you can easily increase your conversion rate from the sub 2% to well above 6% simply by focusing on the reasons people abandon your site.

Getting your Goals setup isn’t difficult. Click on the edit link on your site profile in Google Analytics.

You then want to setup your gaol in one of the Goal Name slots, for instance G1.

When configuring your goal, you should place your completed sale or confirmation page in the goal URL space. Make sure to not append the entire domain, just the information after the site. For instance, instead of wisestartupblog.com/checkout.html I would just use “/checkout.html”.

Then, for each of the steps, you want to enter each page that is required in the checkout process. So you may want to enter a “shipping.html” “billing.html” “confirmation.html” etc. to illustrate the different pages required to buy something on your site.

Goals do not work for offsite tracking, for instance, if your shopping cart is hosted on PayPal, you will not be able to see the activity while the user is on PayPal, you will only be able to see a successfully confirmation when they come back to your page.

Goals Funnel Analysis

Once you have your Goals setup, and you have some data for tracking (goals are not retroactive, so any goals you setup today will only start tracking for today), navigate to your funnel visualization.

Now looking at your funnel, we can see exactly how many people add items to our cart, how many exit the cart, and exit any other part of the checkout process.

Looking at our example above, we can see a huge hole where we are losing money as people exit the checkout process. Of 100 people who enter our shopping cart, 51 people abandon meaning we lose 51 potential customers.

Looking at the next step, we only lose 15 people to the create an account page, so this isn’t as big an issue. So we want to focus on filling the hole in our shopping cart.

Filling Conversion Holes

Now it really depends on what your site looks like, how users interact with your site, etc. so I’ll give you some general best practices:

• Match Visitor Intent with what the visitor expects to see
• Make sure your shipping policies are explained in the shopping cart
• Detail any coupons or rebates available to the consumer while they’re in the shopping cart
• Copy what your competitors are doing well to help make the checkout process easier
• Increase urgency of checkout: for instance, you could offer limited pricing for 24 hours (woot.com anyone?)

Increasing Conversion Rates Takes Time

If you want to make a positive impact on your business and increase conversion rates, you need to get started today. It takes time and patience, but it is worth it. If you consider that 98 out of 100 people leave your site without checking out you have a huge market opportunity.

Let us know any tips you have for using Goals in the comments.

For a full breakdown of Goals and any help in getting setup with your own site, visit Google’s Conversion University.