Goal conversion rate is a metric in Google Analytics that shows the percentage of website visitors who complete a specific action deemed important, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.
If used correctly, you can get a lot of valuable insights from it and enhance your website performance. In this article, we’ll dig a bit deeper into how to get there.
- What is a goal conversion in Google Analytics?
- How is the goal conversion rate calculated?
- Why is it important to track your goal conversion rate?
- How to use subsegments to analyze goal conversions?
- How to investigate and improve your goal conversion rate?
- Final Thoughts
Let’s dive in!
What is a goal conversion in Google Analytics?
A goal conversion in Google Analytics is when a website visitor completes an action designated as a goal for the website. This action can be anything from making a purchase to downloading a PDF file. This is also highly specific for every website. It really depends on what's important to you to get insights from.
You can set up your own goals in Google Analytics to track the conversion of your interest. The tool will then ensure the relevant information is collected and reported to you to get the necessary insights.
How is the goal conversion rate calculated?
The goal conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of goal conversions by the total number of website visitors and multiplying by 100. For example, if a website has 1000 visitors and 100 of them complete a goal, the goal conversion rate would be 10%.
In more straightforward terms, it answers the question: “What percentage of my website visitors completed X.” In this example, “X” can be anything from downloading a file or clicking a link.
Why is it important to track your goal conversion rate?
In today’s business environment, the importance of online presence cannot be understated. Hence, your website is essential to your business and should perform optimally. Your website visitors must find what they are looking for and what you want them to see.
For example, if you build an online course, it should be obvious on your website where people can buy this. Therefore, setting up goal conversion tracking on the sign-up form might be handy. You can now measure what percentage of your website visitors are actually buying your course.
Tracking the goal conversion rate lets you see how well your website achieves its desired goals. This information can then be used to improve the website to increase the goal conversion rate.
How to use subsegments to analyze goal conversions?
Using subsegments can help you better analyze your website's goal conversions. With Google Analytics, you can create subsegments and apply them to the data you already have on hand. By doing this, you can get a bigger picture of who’s converting so that you can make more informed decisions about optimizing your site for better performance.
When creating a subsegment, consider the user types and behaviors that might influence their likelihood of completing goals. For instance, are there browsers or devices that convert better? Are there differences in conversion rates between users referred from search engines versus other sources? You can create targeted strategies for each segment and see what performs better.
How to investigate and improve your goal conversion rate?
Investigating and improving your goal conversion rate is an essential step in optimizing the success of your online business. With Google Analytics, you can easily track your goals and performance to spot improvement areas.
To investigate and improve your goal conversion rate, start by creating Goal Funnels that show how visitors move through a sequence of pages before completing a Goal action.
Once these Goal funnels have been set up, use the Conversion Rate report to monitor progress over time. Analyze which channels drive the most conversions and compare them to other channels to identify discrepancies. In addition, you can tweak different elements that influence the conversion rate. For example, you could redesign the sign-up page on your website and benchmark the conversion rate before and after the redesign. This is possible in Google Analytics and shows whether the new design converts better than the old one.
Final Thoughts
Goal conversion rate is an essential metric for understanding your website's performance. It gives you the insights you need to evaluate your performance and uncover improvement opportunities.
However, implementing goals and optimizing conversion rates can be pretty complex, especially in Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a complex tool that welcomes you with 70+ dashboards and custom reports. Before getting the hang of it, you’d need to have experience training in using Google Analytics.
This is one of the reasons we built Simple Analytics (what’s in the name?). A simple analytics tool with a straightforward dashboard that gives you the insights you need without having to dig through multiple dashboards and custom reports.
You can check out our live dashboard here to see whether this is something you would like for your website. If so, feel free to