GM Simmons Co
PO Box 32012
Jacksonville, FL 32237
(904) 645-7981 email
What is the Best Way to Track Online Sales?
OK, you have a website. It looks really good, your excited, you get it up on the web and start to drive traffic to it. But you really want to know what is working the best for causing visitors to complete a conversion (a sale or form request fill in). How do you do that?
Well by far the best way we know of is utilizing the Free Google Analytics program and entering a Goal for whatever it is you want to track.
However there are several things that you need to know before you go in and set up a Goal in Analytics. We suggest you (or someone you know that can) complete these steps before attempting to set up any Goals.
Make sure that you have on your website a HTML page that visitors go to AFTER a successful Goal conversion. This should not be your homepage or any other page on your site that gets regular traffic, rather one that access to is only for people that have successfully finished a conversion
Consider putting an error page up where people will be taken to in case something is wrong with your conversion process. This will give you data showing where that problem is, and then you can go in and fix it. Nothing worse than having a conversion on your site fail and not know why.
If possible put a dollar figure for each conversion. If you are tracking leads, how many leads on average does it take to produce one new customer? Then what is an average customer worth to your business. From that take the average customer value and divide it by the number of leads it takes to produce one, and you have your value per lead.
So you’re ready to set up your Goal. Well it’s really quite easy-just follow these steps
First Sign in to your Google Analytics account with your user name and password.
Next go to your settings page by clicking the “Edit” link next to the Analytics account you want to set a goal up for.
Go down to the Goals area on the page. You’ll see there are four separate Goal areas, each area can hold up to 5 goals. If you have not created any Goals in your account yet, simply go to the top one and click on “Add Goal”
That will take you to the page where you can enter the name of your new Goal, the Goal type (for the Goals that we describe here, pick URL Destination, the Goal URL (put the page your tracking but only the /pagename.html, not the complete url address), and the Goal Value. Once you’ve done that your finished setting up your Goal, just click Save Goal.
Setting up Goals is one of the most important things you can do in Analytics to help you understand what is working and what isn’t on your website. You’ll always be one step ahead of the game by knowing this information and acting on the data that it provides to consistantly increase your websites effectiveness.
OK, you have a website. It looks really good, your excited, you get it up on the web and start to drive traffic to it. But you really want to know what is working the best for causing visitors to complete a conversion (a sale or form request fill in). How do you do that?
