One of the biggest gains you can make in the profits of your campaigns is to optimize the conversion process. A great way to do this is by using conversion funnels in Google Analytics. By setting this up, you can see exactly where visitors are being lost during the conversion process through a visual interface.
The process is fairly easy. You log into your Google Analytics account and create a new goal. That goal will usually be the URL of your thank you or success page. Then you define the intermediate pages that lead up to that goal page. The first page might be your landing page, then a payment page, then the thank you page. This is your conversion funnel process. You then install the tracking code on those pages and you are done.
Once the data is being gathered you can go into the Goals section and view the report Funnel Visualization. This will show you exactly what is happening to your visitors at each step in the process. By seeing how many are bouncing out on each step, you know just where to focus your efforts to increase conversions. This combined with the Website Optimizer are the most powerful tools I have found for increasing profits of your landing pages.
Here’s a short overview of the process:
Very helpful info as always. Thanks for showing me yet again something I am not using but probably should if I got off my lazy ass.
Actually, I tried but don’t really understand about it.
Hi,
very useful post….but could you also advice on optimizing single landing pages – basically affiliate review pages etc with just a single page of content.
How does one optimize and figure out where and why visitors are being lost?
Megan
I have never used conversion funnels from google analytics before. Thanks for this great guide about it.
That’s grate Chad. But how is it that helpful to affiliates? We don’t control the sales page and thank you page on the advertiser page.
We can get our AM to install the code on the thank you page but the intermediate page (offer page) between your landing page and the thank you page probably be a problem to install your code.
-G
You can place the code on the affiliate page as your goal page, then the intermediate page as your landing page, you can see you bounce rates.
Correct. So what that would tell you is how many people bounced somewhere between when they left your site and when they got to the offer. If that stage of the funnel has a really crappy bounce rate, then the merchant’s site sucks at converting and you might want to contact them about it if you have that kind of relationship.
Or look to see if there is a way to do more pre-sell on your side and link to somewhere closer to the checkout process on their site.
Great tip! Thanks!
Excellent video, thank you you big for help!
good info…,i appreciate your post.
Funny… some of the things you post on your blog seem so simple, yet very few people talk about it. I actually know a lot about GA, but I must admit – I’ve never talked about it much.
Glad you’re keeping things on a different level, as always!
Nice video for funnel setting & goal setting. It’s really helpful video and complete guide about funnel conversion. Thanks.