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For Greater Results: Is Your Website Helping You Sell?

Google Analytics Dashboard

In the initial article of our For Greater Results series, you’ll learn the value of proper goal setting in Google Analytics, along with instructions.

A professional custom website can work as an additional salesperson for your business. One that never takes a lunch break. But is this salesperson doing a good job? Setting up well defined goals in Google Analytics is a way to track sales leads generated by your website. It is a step that many business owners forget, but also one that can make all of the difference.

What are you trying to see?

Most companies can track website sales by simply keeping track of the number of contact form submissions received.  This is called a Destination Goal, and the steps below will help you set it up.  Not every website is built for sales, so there are other types of goals:

  • E-commerce Goals: Track actual product sales completed on your website
  • Duration Goals: Show the length of time a customer spends on your site.
  • Pages/Screens Goals: Monitor how many pages a customer sees each visit.
  • Event Goals: Measure when a customer has clicked a link, or played a video.

With their varying purposes, each of these goals can be beneficial to business owners depending on their independent business goals. For more information, reach out to the VisionFriendly.com team @  [email protected]

How many sales leads did you get?

Now let's walk through entering a Destination Goal to allow you to see how many people have submitted a contact form on your website. If you are feeling brave, you can use these instructions as a basis to set up other goals, but a Destination Goal provides more than enough useful information. 

Important  You will need to know the name of the page your customer sees after they’ve submitted a contact form.  If you don’t know, go to your website and send in a form.  You’ll end up with a web address that looks like this:

https://www.visionfriendly.com/thankyou.asp  (This  is going to be important, so copy it down)

Entering Destination Goals

  1. From your main Google Analytics Report screen, Click the Admin button.1
  2. Which will take you to this view, where you will select Goals
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  3. Then select Add New Goal3
  4. The next page will show a long list of ready-made templates that you can use to set your goals.  Select Custom and press Continue
    image-7-mod
  5. Name your goal and select the type of goal you’d like to add.  Enter the goal name, select Destination and then Continue.
    image-5-mod
  6. The Goal Details area is the final section of setting up a goal in Google Analytics.  Under Destination, enter the web address for your Thank You page, which you copied down earlier. 

    5

You can also enter a value for each lead and define your sales funnel.  These are both optional. The value field is simply the amount of money you make for your average website lead.  The funnel is used to measure how many users became a lead after viewing a specific page of your website (referred to as a conversion). 

Important Note:  If your thank you page has a counter on it (ex. https://visionfriendly.com/thank-you?cf_id=13) DO NOT INCLUDE the highlighted counter portion in your goal, because it will create problems.  You’ll need to do two things:

  1. Change the drop down that says “Equals to”, to “Begins With”
  2. Enter the web address without the counter, https://visionfriendly.com/thank-you in our example

You can add additional steps to learn more about specific pages of your website for increased insights.  For more information about conversion optimization, call us at (630) 553-0000.

Test your tracking

Google provides an easy way to test your goal during the setup. Just above the final Save button, you’ll find a link that allows you to Verify this goal.  This will let you know how many people would be tracked as completing this goal in the last 7 days. Once you’ve completed this screen, hit Save and your goal will be complete

Conclusion

Knowing how well your website is generating leads is a mission critical step that many owners forget.  Armed with this information, you can learn more about your website sales, including:

  • What cities generate the most leads
  • What percentage of website users actually buy?
  • How your marketing campaigns are performing

If you have any questions on goal tracking, or would like to suggest other email and blog topics, please give us a call at (630) 553-0000 or simply contact us here.

About the Author:

Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer

Bobby worked at a motorcycle dealership doing graphics and marketing materials before joining the VisionFriendly.com team in 2009. He started as a junior designer and SEO specialist and quickly became the Director of SEO with result-driven techniques and specializing in SEO-oriented content writing.

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