“Goals are a versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills your objectives” (“About Goals”, n.d.). Goals must be associated to a measurable action such as downloading a whitepaper or completing a form. Goals may be associated with several business objectives such as a building awareness, brand loyalty, generate leads, and increase sales.
To start I solicited my friends and family through Facebook, text message, and email to please visit my blog so I may review the success or failure of my goals. For my first goal, based on visit duration, I had just one visitor who stayed for longer than two minutes and a 14.29% goal conversion rate. While I would have hoped visitors would stay longer, I am not surprised given that many of the people whom I asked to visit do not have any background in marketing or web metrics and the content may not be of particular interest to them. My second goal, having visitors visit more than one page, was slightly more successful with 4 conversions and 57.14% goal conversion rate. I had slightly skewed my own goal numbers by experimenting with filters. One filter I had used was a “Washington D.C. metro” filter which included visitors who lived in either Maryland, Virginia, or the Washington D.C. area. As a result, I eliminated a few friends and family in New Jersey, Florida, and North Carolina who had told me that had visited my blog. It was informative to discover all of filter options available and consider how this might be better used in the future.
While the number of visitors is less than I hoped for it led me to think how goals, filters, and funnels could be valuable in my daily work outside of school.
Filters
My colleagues and I spend a lot of time on our company’s website using the current content on the website to create new content based on existing marketing content. We are also frequently looking for updates and changes that need to be made. Given that, our website metrics are slightly skewed based on internal visits. By using Google profile filters I can remove the IP address of our internal offices and even those of our consultants who work about the country to give a better read of how our consumers are interacting with our website.
Goals and Funnels
One key component to our marketing mix is our e-newsletters. We send out to monthly e-newsletters to about 17,000 subscribers. Given the vast audience, all of whom have opted in to this publication and the time spent creating them, I would like to evaluate whether our e-newsletters are resulting in conversions and ultimately sales. In order to accomplish this I would create a funnel with the anticipated outcome we would like our visitors to have when viewing our e-newsletter. For this past month’s newsletter this order would include:
Another goal I would like to track in the future is downloads of product Sneak Peeks (a 10-15 page preview of our books) to better determine the effectiveness of these tools and if these downloads result in sales. One way we used to track this was by offering unique coupon codes on our Sneak Peeks which would help us to determine if users had purchased as a result of viewing the Sneak Peeks. However we recently decided we were offering too many discount codes and it was diminishing the perceived value of the product. I believe using Google Analytics goals will help us to effectively track the conversion rate without offering a discount code.
About Goals - Analytics Help. (n.d.).Google Help. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012040
While the number of visitors is less than I hoped for it led me to think how goals, filters, and funnels could be valuable in my daily work outside of school.
Filters
My colleagues and I spend a lot of time on our company’s website using the current content on the website to create new content based on existing marketing content. We are also frequently looking for updates and changes that need to be made. Given that, our website metrics are slightly skewed based on internal visits. By using Google profile filters I can remove the IP address of our internal offices and even those of our consultants who work about the country to give a better read of how our consumers are interacting with our website.
Goals and Funnels
One key component to our marketing mix is our e-newsletters. We send out to monthly e-newsletters to about 17,000 subscribers. Given the vast audience, all of whom have opted in to this publication and the time spent creating them, I would like to evaluate whether our e-newsletters are resulting in conversions and ultimately sales. In order to accomplish this I would create a funnel with the anticipated outcome we would like our visitors to have when viewing our e-newsletter. For this past month’s newsletter this order would include:
- Visiting the e-newsletter on our website, most likely via a direct referral from our e-mail announcement. The first goal would be a visit duration goal, for readers to spend between four and six minutes on the page, about the time it requires to read through the entire e-newsletter on our website.
- Setting up a funnel to identify the next steps we hope for our visitors to take upon viewing our e-newsletter. “A Funnel lets you specify a path you expect traffic to take to reach a Destination Goal. When you specify steps in a Funnel, Analytics can the track where visitors enter and exit the path on the way towards your Goal, giving you valuable insight about your site”(“About Goals”, n.d.) In this case, at the end of the e-newsletter we typically focus on one or two products which compliment the topic of the month, for example if we are writing about Response to Intervention, we would link to our book or Professional Learning Community (PLC) Pack for Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners. The goal would be to have readers click on this link and learn more about the product
- Once at the product page, they may read the product description or download a Sneak Peek of the product.
- The ultimate goal is to purchase the product. In order to do so there are several steps to completing an online purchase. 1st) They must add the item and desired quantity to their cart. 1.) Once they are ready to purchase they have to either login or create a new account. 3) Once their account is created they will enter their billing and shipping information, then payment information, and confirm their purchase.
- The last page, or goal destination page, is the confirmation page, which would be the end measure of success. Given that, there are several steps from the newsletter to the goal destination page, and many opportunities for distraction, I would be interested in seeing how my vision for the funnel would look versus actual process.
- There are possibly obstacles, for example many of our customers work with large school districts and district-wide purchases must go through the appropriate channels and often times are submitted via email or fax by way of a purchase order. In this case we find that our marketing automation software, Pardot, does a good job of tracking the conversion rates of identified users.
Another goal I would like to track in the future is downloads of product Sneak Peeks (a 10-15 page preview of our books) to better determine the effectiveness of these tools and if these downloads result in sales. One way we used to track this was by offering unique coupon codes on our Sneak Peeks which would help us to determine if users had purchased as a result of viewing the Sneak Peeks. However we recently decided we were offering too many discount codes and it was diminishing the perceived value of the product. I believe using Google Analytics goals will help us to effectively track the conversion rate without offering a discount code.
About Goals - Analytics Help. (n.d.).Google Help. Retrieved December 4, 2012, from http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1012040
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