Website Optimization Using Google Analytics

If you want to get more leads from your website, you have three options:  Make changes to your website to improve your visit-to-lead conversion rate, get more traffic OR both!  But before you change anything on your site, or spend a penny on advertising to get more website traffic, you need to determine exactly where you are today.  You need your baseline traffic numbers and your website’s current visit-to-lead conversion rate.

One analytics tool that is great for finding this information is Google Analytics.  Pop it on your website (it shouldn’t take more than 3-4 hours to get things set-up correctly).  Be sure you set up goals and funnels and make sure you adjust things so that you and your employees are filtered out of the data.  You might also want to set things up so that downloads and outbound links are tracked as well.

(Note:  If you do business over the phone, you’ll have to take things a step beyond just plain Google Analytics. Contact one of our analysts to learn more.)

Let Google Analytics collect a month or so of data and then start poking around and playing with the various reports you can run.  Make sure that you understand what the reports you’re running represent before you take any action or set-up any tests.

For example – while it might be fine in certain cases, you probably don’t want to run a report that shows your total visits and total conversions and, based on that conversion rate, make decisions as to whether to optimize your website or not.

Why?

Suppose you’re a plumbing company and you only service the state of North Carolina, but you have visits to your website from all over the country.  Looking at total visits and total conversions isn’t a good indication of your website’s ability to convert a prospective customer into a lead because visits from out of your service area wouldn’t be expected to result in a conversion.  In order to really figure out how good (or bad) your website is, you have to segment your visitors into those inside your service area and those outside your service area.

Frequently, we find business owners fixating on improving their website’s conversion rates when really they should be focused on getting more visitors from within their service area to their website.  Google Analytics is a very powerful tool.  But, like any tool, it’s only as good as the technician using it!  Want to learn more?  Check out one of Blue Corona’s weekly marketing analytics webinars (every Thursday from 1-2pm EST)

Happy analyzing!