Goal funnels help you identify sticking points in the conversion process.

As affiliates and marketers, conversions are the ultimate goal. A conversion could be a sale, a click, or even a visit to a particular page. No matter what the goal for your website is, you should be tracking the path of conversions to identify areas for improvement.

Create a goal

Once your website has Google Analytics tracking, log in and go to the website overview. Click “edit” under “Actions.” Choose “Goals” and “add goal.” Turn the goal on, and select how important it is. There are three options for “Goals” – “Time on Site” “URL Destination” and “Pages/Visit.” Time on Site is a great goal for content-focused sites or sites with cost per mil ads. URL Destination is an appropriate choice for e-commerce websites or to track visits to a particular landing page. Pages per visit, on the other hand, can be used as a measure of how “deep” into a site visitors go, great for measuring engagement.

Create a funnel

A marketing funnel or goal funnel is the same idea in Analytics as it is out of Analytics. Website visitors come to your site with a particular question in mind, and your website should answer that question and then move them into the action you want; this is known as inbound marketing. Setting up funnel tracking allows you to track the number of people who engage and identify where those potential conversions are lost. For an e-commerce store, this would be something like shopping page, checkout, and transaction confirmation.

Identify sticking points

Not every visitor or potential customer on your website will go through the full funnel and convert. Use Goal Tracking and funnel tracking to identify where and how visitors are exiting. Take a very close look at those pages, identify what about that page might be causing them to leave (Cost? Lack of trust indicators? Not including information they may be looking for?) and try to fix it, using A/B testing for the fastest results.