Having insights on your blog or site’s traffic will help you in making important decisions. I have seen both kinds of webmasters, those who are moderately serious, and those who are extremely serious about knowing how people are interacting with their blogs. After a couple of years, I see those who were more serious about it, are way ahead than those who were not. Having Conversion funnels and tracking on a blog will keep you one step ahead of others.
Whether you have a blog, an online store, an affiliate landing page, or a corporate site, tracking how the audience is interacting with your site is always a good idea. You might have read the previous article on how to track clickbank, today you will learn more on tracking. You can track many important aspects such as the number of unique visitors, their countries, cities, the pages they landed on, their session duration, etc.
Each one of these factors will help you in knowing what is working for you and what needs to be improved. So no more guesswork, you get reliable data that helps you in making informed decisions about your next move.
Google Analytics is the Answer!
For this, we have one free tool, thanks to Google. Analytics by Google is such a powerful tool you can use for this purpose. All you need is an email account to signup and place their code in your blog to let the magic happen.
Having Google Analytics in a blog is a very common practice, almost everyone has it. Most just use it to track basic information as discussed above, however, as an affiliate marketer you can take advantage of a feature called “Goals and Conversions”.
You can define your events in Google Analytics and track when those events take place (conversions). In this how-to guide, I am going to show you how can design such conversion funnels.
Benefits of Conversion Funnels
A Conversion Funnel helps you track when a desired event takes place. For example, if your website has a page that only gets viewed when someone successfully makes a payment you can set goals to track this. This is a very important page that must be tracked intelligently. We use Goal Tracking for this. It tells you how people landed on this page.
Let’s say you are running Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other UTM campaigns which generate several sales. If you want to know which platform is bringing more sales, here is where Conversion Tracking will help you. Follow the below-given steps to design your own funnel.
1 – Go to Goals
After you log in your Google Analytics Account, click on the Admin icon first then click on Goals as shown in the picture.
2- Design Your New Goal
Click on the “New Goal” button. On this page, you will see all your designed goals. Below you can see one goal along with its conversion stats “122 conversions in last 7 days”. You can design a total of 20 such Goal Funnels.
3- Define Your Goal Settings
There are lots of options on this page if you want to track leads, conversions or a page view. It is easier to define your conversion action yourself. For this, scroll down a bit and click on “Custom”
4- Name Your Funnel and Adjust Your Goal
Now you name your goal. You can name it anything that is convenient for you to remember (just in case you create multiple goals). Then choose the Type of Goal. To track when someone lands on a specific page of your website choose “Destination”
5- Select Your Destination and Define Your Conversion Funnel
After you choose the “Destination” option, now you need to enter the page URL that you wish to track. For example, I entered /thank-you because this is the page that appears when someone has successfully made the payment for products I am selling. You don’t need to enter the full web address here, just enter what comes after your main domain.
Afterwards turn on “Funnel” option, by default it is turned off but it is very helpful. Once you turn it on, you will see a bunch of new fields. Define steps of your funnel here as you see in the below screenshot. For example, let’s say, my site has 3 products, in this case, I have entered the URLs of a user journey. Homepage > Products Page > Single Product > Add to Cart > Checkout > Payments. I entered their URLs in the same order.
This will help you in tracking the product-wise conversion journey.
6- Conversion Funnel Visualization
You are all done with the settings for now. If you want to see the funnel, just go into your Google Analytics home, click on Conversions and Choose Funnel Visualization.
Here you will be able to see the entire user journey. For Example, how many people landed on the homepage, how many of them explored product 1, 2 or 3, how many added products into the cart, how many checked out and how many paid. This helps you in understanding the entire user journey as you want to see. You can now define what is important to you and Google Analytics shows you what is happening.
That’s it. I mostly check my funnels daily so I know how the conversions are taking place. You can not only see the funnel visualization but you can also check the percentages of conversions that are coming through different traffic sources.
Go, give it a try. In case you feel any issue, feel free to comment for help.