Unlocking the power of Google Analytics – Tracking leads & Sales

Google Analytics gets a lot of attention these days. Most people in the space realize that having a solid analytics solution is important and that they should be tracking their web traffic. But do they know what to look for? Setting up an account is easy. All you need to do is create your account and add a piece of code to every page you want to track. Then just sit back and watch all the wonderful stats start to poor in. Simple enough right?

But then what?

Analytics users need to understand what they are looking for within the reports and in order to do that they need to ask the right questions. For instance, if you wanted to know what % of your website’s visitors sign up for your newsletter, and then what % of those subscribers purchase from you as a result of your e-mail marketing efforts, would you know where to look? Would you know how to set that up?

These are the business questions you need to be asking, because once answered, you can start to take action. Having an analytics package is useless if you are not going to take action based on your findings.

In the above newsletter example you need to do the following to answer your question.

Step 1: You MUST have goals set up for your newsletter lead generation funnel & a separate goal for your sales funnel. Use the “thank you for subscribing to our news letter page” & the “sale confirmation” page as your respective goal pages. (see the settings link in your Google analytics console)

Once this is set up you will be able to see reports that show the number of newsletter sign ups and sales

Step2: Tag the links in your newsletter. This will allow you to see where your traffic is coming from in the traffic sources - referring sites reports. Use the Google analytics URL builder to set this up. http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55578&hl=en

Step 3: Access the traffic sources - referring sites reports, locate the tagged URLS (that indicate someone has visited your site via the links on the news letter) click on the goals tab at the top to view the source by goal conversion. This will tell you how many people from your newsletter converted into a sale.

Now you have baseline metrics that tell you how well your e-mail marketing campaign is doing.

Still unsure of what to do next?

TEST…. Try to beat your current performance. Do A/B testing for your e-mails and see if you can increase sales (remember to tag your B e-mail differently than you’re A e-mail)

Hope this helps