See How Your Site’s Small Goals Lead to Conversions

See How Your Site’s Small Goals Lead to Conversions

 On your web site, you probably have lots of small goals (micro-conversions) for your users to complete along the path to your primary business goals (like sales or other conversions). These micro-conversions might include signing up for an email list, downloading your demo, or more.

In this case, you probably want to be able to measure how often one goal leads to a major conversion like purchasing.

See how one goal leads to another in Google Analytics

The key to measuring this is to associate an event in your analytics suite with each of your micro-conversions. Doing so makes this analysis quite straightforward: just look at the conversion rate for all visitors who performed that event.

Let’s step through how to do this in Google Analytics. (If you’re using a different analytics suite, the steps for setting up an event and checking the conversion rate will probably be similar.)

1. Use event tracking to declare to your analytics tool that an event (i.e., your micro-conversion) has occurred.
1. Make sure you’ve set up Google Analytics tracking on your site.
2. Call the _trackEvent() method in your Javascript wherever a micro-conversion occurs (see the example below). _trackEvent() takes the following parameters:

• category is your name for the group of objects being tracked. For instance, if clicking this link causes the user to download your demo, you might make the category “download”. You might instead choose to use something like “microConversion” as a means of keeping all your related data in one place.
• action is the type of user interaction that caused the event. This might be a “pageView”, a “buttonClick”, or something else entirely.
• label (optional) is your label for this particular action. For instance, you might label it “Clicked the demo download button.”
• value (optional) can be used to represent any numerical quantity you like, but I recommend using the dollar value of the interaction. (For many micro-conversions, that would be 0.)

1. After a few days, check the ecommerce conversion rate for your events in your Analytics dashboard (see the screenshot below).
1. In the Reporting tab, click Content.
2. In the Content section, click Events, then click Top Events.
3. Click Ecommerce in the “Explorer” section of the window.
4. Check the ecommerce conversion rate and other statistics for the micro-conversions you’re interested in.

Steps to viewing the conversion rate and sales associated with your many small goals, or micro-conversions

See How Your Site’s Small Goals Lead to Conversions

For instance, if your micro-conversion occurs when someone clicks on a particular element on your page, you might add an onclick property to the element like this:

<a href="someUrl.html" 

  onclick="_trackEvent(category, action, opt_label, opt_value)">

  Click here!</a>

A concrete example: How often does downloading the demo lead to a purchase?

As part of my work on X-Plane.com, I needed two metrics:

• the conversion rate for a typical demo download (where users don’t receive email from X-Plane), and
• the conversion rate for a demo download which opted-in to our lifecycle email course.

So, I set a “download” event to fire any time a user downloads the demo. Another event, in the “emailSignup” category, fires when someone signs up for the course in combination with the demo download.

By looking at the conversion rate column, we can see that a person who receives our emails is more than twice as likely to buy as a user who doesn’t!

Questions?

If you have questions about how to see one goal’s influence on another, drop me a comment below!

More resources

• “Event Tracking Using ga.js” in Google Analytics’ Developer Guide. This is the canonical source for how to fire an event using Google’s tracking code.