Better Conversion Tip #6 – Use Google Analytics
Google offers a free conversion and traffic tracking tool that you should take advantage of, if you aren’t already. The tracking tool is comprised of a bit of Javascript code that you put at the bottom of your landing and “thank you” pages—really any page on your site you want metrics for. Now whenever someone lands on your site and orders your product, Google will track those conversions for you for free.
But Google Analytics goes way beyond simple conversion tracking. With it you can discover the answers to such questions as “what percent of my visitors read my privacy policy before ordering?”
Or “Of those who read my terms and conditions, what’s the spread between those who end up buying versus abandoning?”
One caveat: Google doesn’t update its stats in real time, but the tool is perfectly useful for checking your metrics with the last day or even from a few hours ago.
There’s much more that Google Analytics can do for you, so rather than repeat their well-written content and “how to” instructions, I recommend you read up on the latest version of Analytics and get started here:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Even if you use Analytics now or have used in in the past, Google keeps improving it, and the latest version is no exception.
Note: Analytics automatically integrates with Google Adwords, so if you use Google PPC to gain traffic, when you enable Analytics, you’ll notice two additional helpful columns on the far right: Conversion Rate and Cost/Conversion.
Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who took the action you specified when generating the Google conversion code. So if 1000 people went to your site, and 247 took the action you wanted, your conversion rate would be 24.7% (247 / 1000 * 100 = 24.7).
Your cost per conversion takes the amount of money you’ve spent on PPC and divides it by the number of people who have taken action. So if you’ve spent $50.00 on PPC, and 40 people took the action you wanted, you would have a cost per conversion of $1.25 ($50 / 40 = $1.25).
You want to watch the second figure closely, because if your cost/conversion exceeds what you are earning per conversion on your site (over that visitor’s lifetime), you’ll be losing money.