Hooray for Google Analytics! It's Powerful and it's Free. Part 1: Goal Tracking

As you can already tell this post is about singing the praises of Google Analytics. First of all no I am not being paid by Google I just love their product. It has so many valuable features that I have used to help make crucial decisions regarding the marketing and design of my site that I wanted to share how they helped me. Also instead of writing one long posting I decided to break it up and this is part one.

For the last year or so I have been using Google Analytics to track activity on my website. Now in the past I used the stat tracker that came with my Godaddy.com hosting account( didn't provide enough information) and a service called Indextools (provided plenty of information and the ability to drill-down but wasn't exactly cheap). Eventually I found Google Analytics and proceeded to paste the tracking code into my pages.

I suggest that all website owners use analytics because they allow you to monitor how people are actually using your site. As a designer or developer you may have an idea about how you want visitors to navigate your site and what content you think they will find compelling but nothing is more eye opening than to actually find out what your visitors are drawn to and what they decide to not to engage with at all on your site.

My personal favorite feature is the goal feature. I use it to track how effective my newsletter sign up link is and all the subsequent actions which includes confirming the subscription. My first goal ( I call it 'intention to subscribe') tracks how many people respond to my call to action to sign up for my newsletter which is critical to my new business model. For the last 90 days my conversion rate has been 10.42% so that means that 89.58% of my visitors leave my site without visiting my subscription page.

Goal two, 'subscription submitted', measures how many visitors visited my subscription page and decided to subscribe. That conversion rate is 3.65%. My third and last goal is called 'subscription confirmed' and tracks the clicks of the link in my subscription confirmation email that's sent to their inbox. I wish I could say that my conversion rate for this goal is 3.65% because that would mean that everyone that signed up went on to confirm their subscription but that isn't the case because that conversion rate is 2.50%.

From these stats I figured that I definitely need to improve the call to action that initiates the subscription process, make sure that my copywriting helps visitors understand the value in becoming subscribers and keep my subscription process clear by ensuring they understand it is a double-opt in process.

If you have an e-commerce website and want to track where your visiors are abandoning their shopping carts or any process you want visitors to engage in on your website this is a great tool.