Advanced Crafters’ Guide To Google Analytics

Craft Maker Pro » Advanced Crafters’ Guide To Google Analytics

Every crafter using Google Analytics should know this… There’s much more to Google Analytics than just checking PPC management or your online craft store visits.

advanced-gaYou now probably have the basic knowledge after reading our Crafters’ Guide To Google Analytics. And, just like most GA users, you probably very rarely venture far from the comfort of the reports shown on the dashboard.

That’s all the analytical information you need, you may be thinking … or is it?

Learn some of the more advanced features of Google Analytics and boost your craft site traffic analysis and sales.

Conversions

What You Will Learn:

  • What is a Conversion?
  • Goal conversions vs Ecommerce conversions
  • Relevance to your business

What Is A Conversion?

A conversion is the completion of an activity on your site and is an important metric used to measure how well your site meets business objectives.

The Conversions report is located on the left side corner of the Analytics page.

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Goal Conversions Vs Ecommerce Conversions

You must define goals in Google Analytics in order to track goal conversions. Ecommerce tracking is Javascript code on your craft store’s shopping cart or site that gathers information in order to complete a transaction as it happens.

A goal conversion happens once a visitor completes a set goal through your site, such as a registration for an e-mail subscription, or completing a download. On the other hand, Ecommerce reports show information about purchases from your site, product and sales performance, and the total number of completed transactions. This metric can be found on the Ecommerce tab under the Conversions tab.

Relevance To Your Business:

This will make you understand the effects of your business strategies and site structure on your goals. It also helps you in making informed decisions about your business strategy.

Goals And Funnels

To understand how many visitors are coming to your site and completing specific processes you’ve set, you’ll need to set up goals and funnels.

What you will learn:

  • What are Goals and Funnels?
  • How to set up a Goal?
  • How to setup a Funnel?
  • Verify correct URL for Goals
  • Relevance to your business

Goals

What Is A Goal?

Goals are used to lay down your craft business’ objectives and see if your site is meeting them. Goals also help you track visitors’ actions, like how they respond to your site’s registration form or how long they stayed on a page.

How To Setup A Goal?

Setting up goals in Google Analytics is easy. Here’s how:

  • Click on the “Admin” at the right side corner of the Analytics page.
  • Click on the website profile for your site.
  • Click on the Goals section and click on the + goal. Goals allow you to set 20 Goals per profile. Each profile is limited to have 4 sets of Goals, and each set can have at least 5 Goals.
  • Name your goal. Under Goal Type, select the type of Goal you want such as URL destination, visit duration, pages per visit or event.
  • After that, more options will appear. Under “match type” select “exact match” and input your goal url as “/about-us/contact-us/” if your whole url was /about-us/contact-us/
  • Scroll down below if you want to know more about Match Types and Goal Value.
  • You can track sales by adding goal value.

Match Types

  • Exact match – it is for standard, fixed URLs. An exact match is a match on every EXACT character in your URL. Example: /about-us/contact-us/. Always remember, leading or trailing whitespaces in the goal field will invalidate the goal.
  • Head Match—to eliminate trailing URL parameters. You can use this option when your page URLs is in general the same but when they include extra parameters at the end that you want to exclude. Example: . In this case, the id varies for every other user. You could still match this page by using /checkout.cgi?page=2 as the URL and selecting Head Match as your Match Type.
  • Regular Expression Match—for matching on multiple criteria. A regular expression uses special characters to enable wildcard and flexible matching. If a user could be coming from one of many subdomains, and your URLs use session identifiers, you could use a regular expression to define the constant element of your URL. For example, checkout.cgi\?page=1 will match as well as .

Goal Value

Goal Value is the checkout page’s average sale value. To know the value, take the amount of new business generated via your website over the last major statistical interval (at least a quarter, preferable two quarters) and divide it by the number of raw leads for that time period. For example, if you generated $100,000 from your website last quarter and had 1,000 leads, your goal value for a new lead is $10, and that’s what you put in the goal value box.

Funnels

What Is A Funnel?

A funnel is a sequence of pages that you expect users to undertake before they reach the goal. For example, the funnel may include steps in your checkout process that lead you to the thank you page (goal). While adding a goal, you also have the option to create funnel for that goal.

A Funnel allows you to see the number of visitors who choose to pay for a transaction on your site, the conversion rate of visitors to customers, and the part of the process at which users are leaving your site before reaching the Goal.

How To Set Up A Funnel?

To set up a funnel, you have to fill out necessary information upon setting up your Goal. At the end of the page, you’ll see an option to Use Funnel. Make sure the box is ticked to create a Funnel.

  1. Enter the URL (e.g /home) of the page where you expect users to enter. Enter the name (e.g home) and if that page is important, select the “required step” checkbox.
  2. Click “+ Goal Funnel Step” to enter more URLs for the Funnel.
  3. Enter the next URL you want users to go after the URL specified above and supply the name.
  4. When you have finished adding pages, click Save.

Verifying Correct URL Expressions for Goals

After completing the set up process, make sure that your Goal URL is correct. Do this by searching the page in the Pages report using the exact URL you used when creating your goal. If you are able to successfully view the pages you expect after doing a search, you can safely assume your URL or expression will work.

Relevance To Your Craft Business:

Goals allow you to track discrete actions, like transactions with a minimum purchase amount. A Funnel allows you to track the path you expect visitors to take to reach a Goal. Combing Goals and Funnels will help you analyse how well your site or app directs people towards your target.

Campaigns

Campaigns allow craft business owners to see whether a marketing project was successful by just using this statistical data available from Google Analytics.

Go to the left side of the Analytics page, choose Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns.

If you have no AdWords or other campaigns set up, you won’t see any information on that area. If you have AdWords campaigns set up and hooked up, you’ll see that info.

What you will learn:

  • Tracking online campaigns
  • How do I track a marketing activity?
  • The URL Builder tool and its parameters
  • How to drill down a campaign
  • Relevance to your business

Tracking Online Campaigns

Campaigns in Google Analytics will allow you to track your online marketing campaigns. To do so, link tagging is used to track your marketing activities in Google Analytics.

For example, e-mail marketing. You see that at some part of the message, there’s a call to action URL telling you to click, visit, or check this page. The URL that looks like what is shown below is called a link/campaign tag:

https://craftmakerpro/?utm_source=CustomerList&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Ebooks

This shows specific information about your online marketing campaigns such as promotion of your eBook, newsletter campaigns, social networks ads, etc. Every piece of information collected from link tagging will help you make informed business decisions about your marketing activities.

You can track:

  • Social network advertising campaigns
  • AdWords campaigns
  • E-mail marketing campaigns
  • Microsoft adCenter campaigns

How Do I Track A Marketing Activity?

All the campaigns mentioned above can be tracked and analysed by using Google Analytics. It will also allow you to measure the performance of your online marketing campaigns. To do that, you need to tag your campaigns. Actually you need to tag the URLs that you will be using. You can do that by using the URL Builder tool .

From that page you can easily build the URLs which can later be shared on different mediums (email, ppc, referrals).

The URL Builder Tool And Its Parameters

The URL Builder  will help you modify the links that you’re using in your marketing activities.

Steps in using the URL Builder:

  • To produce a link tag for your campaign, you need to enter the URL that you want to promote.
  • Fill up the parameters. See the parameters definition below to be guided.
  • Click “Generate URL”

Example of a generated URL:

https://craftmakerpro/?utm_source=CustomerList&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Ebooks

utm_source=CustomerList&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Ebooks

You will see additional information on a link. This is used to deliver the tag information to Google Analytics once the link is clicked. Tagged links allow you to evaluate the performance of individual links within your campaign.

Definition Of Parameters:

  • utm_source – This is the place where your clicks will be generated to your website. e.g. google, citysearch, newsletter4, billboard.
  • utm_medium – This is the type of ad or marketing campaign, e.g.: cpc, banner, email newsletter.
  • utm_campaign – It is an easily recognised name such as slogan, promo code, etc. for a product.
  • Campaign Term (Optional) – Identify paid search keywords. If you’re manually tagging paid keyword campaigns, you should use this parameter to specify the keyword.
  • Campaign Content (Optional) – Used to differentiate similar content, or links within the same ad. For example, you can use this parameter if you have two call-to-action links within the same email message. You should also set different values for each so you can tell which version is more effective.

After you follow the steps mentioned above, simply visit that URL. This should record a “visit” in Analytics. Place the generated link on your campaign. The user will still arrive at your site, but Analytics will gather every piece of information along the way.

How To Drill Down A Campaign

Go to the left side of the Analytics page, choose Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns. This will display a list of all the campaigns that have been tagged for Google Analytics to track for you. Simply, click on that campaign to drill down to the results and you will see the different pieces of information.

Relevance To Your Business:

Campaigns are a good way of attracting quality return visitors to your crafting site. It provides core metrics so you can understand the full impact of your marketing activities on consumer searches and website visits. You can then use these pieces of information to get an idea of your campaign’s performance, and to measure the interaction between search and display for planning purposes.

Sure, we all want our website to be the easy-to-follow track where no one ever gets lost. But you don’t get there without constant analysis and optimization.

Check our 30 Free Ways To Promote Your Craft Business And Products Online  and pair it with your Google Analytics learning.

To learn more about Google Analytics, please check our other tutorials:

Happy Analysing!

Gary Capps
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