If you talk to ten different eCommerce sites that are using Analytics, the odds are good that at least five of them are using Google Analytics.  If you talk to ten different Google Analytics (GA) users, probably only one of them is using their Goal tracking for anything other than cart conversions.  Long story short, an awfully large percentage of retailers aren’t getting a lot of value out of Google analytics.

 This is in part due to the fact that most companies using GA don’t tend to have a full time analyst asking specific questions of the website data, and also due to the fact that while GA is great free software, there is no vendor support in terms of best practices for tool usage.  (If you want an analytics vendor with a top-notch customer support/analysis team, look no farther than our friends at Coremetrics)

Here are two alternate goals, and one new way to look at them using Google Analytics. They are easy to set up and monitor, they will give you a lot more visibility into website outcomes, and will help you start asking the right questions about what you can be doing to optimize your website for increased conversions. 

For additional information about how to set up goals in Google Analytics, click here. 

Goal 1: ‘About Us’ page visitor conversion 

If a visitor cares enough to want to learn about your business, they are that much closer to converting.  Set up a goal funnel with the first page being the About Us page URL, and the last page being the transaction completed page.  You now have an report that shows you the conversion rates of people who visit your ‘about us’ page as part of a session.  Once you have the results in, you can start applying changes to this page in an attempt to increase conversion outcomes.

Goal 2: Micro Conversion Points 

A micro conversion point is a non shopping cart transaction.  Examples include newsletter signup, catalog request or wish list signup.  Better understanding of how many visitors choose these micro-conversions will give a better understanding of what a visitor really wants from your site.  Also if any of these micro-conversion points has multiple steps, you can build a goal funnel and look at step abandonment, just like for your shopping cart.

Goal Tip: Use filters to segment your goal results 

By filtering your Google results based on different traffic source segments, you can get a much better understanding of how visitors from different sources convert for different goals.  For example, what does the cart abandonment funnel look like for direct type in visitors vs. paid search traffic?  Setting up funnels is also fairly straightforward, and you can see a more detailed posting from the team at Lunametrics on how to accomplish this by clicking here.

A better understanding of site outcomes equals an ability to optimize them over time.  Taking the steps above will add invaluable marketing insight to your analytics tool.

Cheers,

Jim