If you don’t know it already, let me be the one to tell you that Google Analytics is huge! It’s one of the best online tools you can use to grow your business – IF you know how to use it. However, analyzing data isn’t the end-all of Google Analytics, friends! There are so many amazing things you can do with analytics. That’s why I want to show you exactly how to use Google Analytics to turn your website into a conversion machine! Because you need to convert your audience to grow your business and make that money!
Google Analytics – Beginners 101
I get it, Google Analytics is confusing and complicated. But I can’t stress the importance of learning how to read your website analytics and setting up your account to work for your business. When you have an optimized website, Google Analytics can be your very best friend
If you need help setting up your own Google Analytics, here is a great post that walks you through it step by step or check out The Ins and Outs of Google Analytics. For this post, we are going to discuss more advanced strategies, so we can dive straight into converting those website visitors!
Google Analytics – Intermediate
Now, Google Analytics (let’s call it GA for short) can be used to analyze the impact of each idea that you implement on your website. You can’t just launch that new product or course on your website and leave for a 5-month vacation. You need to track these products so you know exactly how they are performing, how people landed on that page, or how visitors are interacting with these elements. Why? So that you know exactly what TO DO (or NOT to do) when you launch your next product or course!
The importance of Google Analytics
Every single great strategy needs to be measured. If you can’t prove it was a great strategy – people might not believe you. The pudding is in the proof, as they say.
Each new feature that you add to your website can be tracked in GA to tell you exactly how many of your visitors are using it and how that affects your conversion rate. What are they clicking on, what is their buying behavior? This can all be tracked with analytics.
Google Analytics answers the what, where, why and how much. It tells you what behavior is taking place on your website, where it’s taking place, why it is happening and how much of it is happening. This information can tell you the impact or performance of each page, widget, funnel or any other feature you have on your website.
Once you know how to read this information, you can implement changes to react or deal with your audience’s site behavior to improve your strategy. Your website analytics can tell you exactly where your site is making you money. Hint: it might not be where you expected!
Ok, I could talk about why Google Analytics is so important (and so cool) all day! Let’s quickly discuss three actions you can use in GA to start converting your visitors into clients or customers, like now!
Create Goals
Inside GA, you can set goals that you want to achieve for your website and track their success (or failure). You can set your Goals in coordination with any ‘key actions’ you want to track within your website such as purchases, lead generation, etc. By setting these goals, you can track your conversion rates on each decision and feature of your website.
The 3 different top-level goal categories:
- Template-based Goals
- Smart Goals
- Custom Goals
These 3 goals can be further broken down into 5 goal types:
- Destination = visitors to a certain page
- Duration = time spent on a website
- Pages/Screens per session = how many pages they view per website visit
- Event = measure events going on within your website
- Smart Goals = machine learning to analyze various signals about your website to determine which are likely to result in conversions (this is a little more advanced)
Tracking these goals using data analytics will give proof that your decisions or methods are working in your favor. So be sure to implement them into your conversion strategy!
Set Up Mini Funnels
As much as we might wish otherwise, it’s in our human nature to jump around a website. To fully understand a website’s conversion rate – you need to set up and analyze numerous goals around the website, rather than running single-page reports.
To keep your visitors on a set trajectory toward investing in your business, you need to set up mini funnels to get them there. This means that your visitors will be going through many steps (or a mini funnel) within your website. For example:
Product Page → Cart Page → Checkout Page Information (Step 1) → Checkout Page Payment (Step 2) → Thank you/Confirmation Page.
So it’s important to track this navigation by setting up different goals that follow your website users as they proceed through these “mini funnels” you’ve set up for them. It sounds more complicated than it actually is, I promise!
Segmentation
You absolutely need to segment if you plan to use your analytics to take advantage of your conversions. By segmenting your audience, you can get endless insights on which behaviors or tactics each segment takes within your website. It’s recommended that you segment your website visitors into at least four different groups:
- Mobile visitors (new)
- Mobile visitors (returning)
- Desktop visitors (new)
- Desktop visitors (returning)
Eventually, as you become an analytics pro, you will be able to segment even further to get even more detailed information from your visitor’s behavior!
Conclusion
It’s important to understand the analytics of your website so that you know exactly what behaviors and choices your visitors are making when they land on your site. Once you capture enough data, you can then make a confident assertion about your audience. You are better able to serve them a golden plate holding exactly what they want. When your audience has what they want, you can more easily convert them into paying customers or clients!
By optimizing your Google Analytics, you are setting your business up to be a conversion savvy money-making machine.
If you want a free course on Google Analytics, click here! Have any questions? Feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns. I am always happy to help you!
