Before we talk about goals and conversions it’s important to understand what Micro Conversions and Macro Conversions are:
- A Micro Conversion is a series of actions or activities a user performs on a web site leading up to the primary conversion; the macro conversion.
- For example signing up for an email newsletter or visiting a series of products on your site during the buy process…those are micro conversions.
Macro Conversions are essentially the primary goals of your site.
- If you’re an e-commerce site one of your macro goals or conversions would be for someone to buy something.
- That person most likely got to the site through a series of micro conversions (i.e. signed up for email newsletter, downloaded a product brochure)
- But once they buy that is a macro conversion. And that’s easily trackable from the confirmation or receipt page they receive after the buy.
Keep Micro and Macro goals in the forefront of your mind when you’re deciding which goals you would like to track.
A quick review of the conversion goal types:
- URL Destination – This is when someone visits a particular page on your site after completing an action. For example, a thank you page. When someone fills out a form to subscribe to your email list a ‘thank you’ page is served up after completing the form. That is a conversion because an action was completed by subscribing and the thank you page has been reached.
Visit Duration and the Pages per Visit conversion goals:
Visit Duration:
- Triggers a conversion when you set a goal of 5 minutes on site. If someone stays on your web site for longer than 5 minutes that goal has been met.
Pages per Visit:
- When a user visits a certain number or sequence of pages that you want to track that would be a conversion.
- For example, you can set up the goal if a visitor views 2 or more pages that that goal has been met and it will be reported in analytics as such.
One of the most fascinating goals is the Events Goal and specifically Event Tracking.
- It’s one thing to be able to track when someone accesses a page on your web site or track how long they stay.
- A lot of web sites now use videos like we do at Edwards Communications. But how do you track what videos have been watched or the average length of time watched?
You can also track visitor actions such as:
- PDF or other file downloads
- Interaction with Adobe Flash Objects
- Event Tracking will also report errors users receive when purchasing items on an e-commerce site
Setting up your goals:
Go through your site, page by page and write down the goals you would like to set up.
For example, if you have an email newsletter that people sign up for write that down and then get the URL for the Thank You page because that will be the URL you enter as you setup your destination goal.
If you would like to learn how to set up Event goals and Event tracking a little more in-depth sign up to receive our Happy Hour Recaps. Once you do you’ll be able to download all of our premium content, including our latest guide, ‘How to Set up Events in Google Analytics”
Conversions/About Goals: Google Analytics question and answer page
This week’s Happy Hour Recap was shot at Senor Tequila’s Mexican Grill and Cantina right at Shaker Square:
Shaker Square Web Site • Senor Tequila Facebook page • Yelp
