Develop and Track Site KPIs and ROI to Optimize Marketing
Why it's important
It’s essential to know what visitors to your website are responding to. Although some CMS systems contain rudimentary analytics, a dedicated service will show the root to sales or business lead conversions. Even if you’re not going into detailed reports now, that data will be collected and available from the time the analytics package is installed.
Getting it done
Set up your analytics software to track specific goals - e.g. making a purchase or signing up for an email list - and the conversion point for each goal. If your analytics can't do this, get one that can.
To create a goal in Google Analytics:
- Open Analytics and go into one of your profiles.
- Click Admin in the top navigation. It's next to the Customization tab.
- Open Goals in the View column.
- Click New Goal and enter a goal name and goal destination URL. You can edit existing goals here by clicking the name of your goal.
- Specify match type depending on how you handle your confirmation page.
- Assign a monetary value to your goal, even if you're not measuring purchases. This will allow Analytics to calculate value for channel, landing page and visitor.
Set up conversion funnels in your analytics suite as well so you can track progress step-by-step and identify points of friction for customers:
- Go into your goal by clicking the name on the Goals page.
- Click on Goals Details.
- Turn on the Funnel.
- Enter the URLs of the pages people visit to go through the conversion process. This will be different for every website.
- If you don't have a predetermined path, go to the Reverse Goal Path report under Conversions to see the three pages visited for each goal conversion.
Install a heat map on your pages so you can monitor design and content elements that drive user engagement. Use these metrics to prioritize design, content and marketing efforts that will impact on your business most, and deprioritize efforts that don't move the needle.
External resources
- Google Analytics
- The Small Business Guide to Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- A Guided Tour of Search Console