Ever wonder how people found or interact with your website? Google Analytics (GA) can help. More specifically, setting up goals in GA will help you determine what visitors are doing and if you’re meeting your business objectives as well. Fueled with this data, you can then make decisions to influence online behavior.
By setting up a purchase goal, for example, you can see how visitors arrived and what they purchased, plus the overall conversion rate and value, if you assign one. But one of the leading benefits is being able to determine what happened to those who abandoned the cart, so to speak. GA goals lets you see where visitors left the purchase process and where they went.
Keeping with our example above, you learn that 25% of prospects exit the purchase cycle from the page immediately before the sale is completed; or perhaps they purchased another product on your site instead. What can you do? You can run an A/B test to shift around page elements or products to see what affects their behavior. Whatever the cause, you can test and adjust as needed to improve your conversion goals.
In addition, there may be other tasks you want visitors to complete as well:
- Sign-up for your email newsletter
- Complete the contact form
- Visit your social media accounts
Of course goals will vary for each business but they are quick to set up. The best advice is to keep the goals simple at first to ensure your understanding of the results and then gradually increase their complexity. In all cases, Google Analytics will help you achieve your goals.
