How to Measure Conversions with Google Analytics

You remember, a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about conversion rates. Yes, and how. Making an improvement to your conversion rate the percentage of people who are coming to your website, who actually contact you that's your conversion rate. Yeah, trying to make some improvements there is good because it not only has an immediate impact, but it also will impact any future traffic you get. So then if you go out and do work to actually get more visitors to your website, it's going to have an impact on those too, and I was saying how important it was, yeah, yeah. So one of my students asked well, that's great. How do we measure our conversion rates? I want to know what my conversion rate is. Yeah, say it right. No, it's Google Analytics, google Analytics.

And the reason I didn't talk about it then during that episode is that it's kind of become almost an advanced topic, because you remember when google analytics was re-released no, I think about a year ago I talked, we talked about this, okay, and how annoying it was, and how, who it was. How annoying it was, oh, probably. Yeah, google came out with what they call g4 and and I spent probably more than 10 hours just trying to figure out how to set up conversion, how to measure conversions in Google Analytics and I kind of know what I'm doing. I'm not like a total newbie so it was quite annoying that I couldn't and this is like I said in the episode a couple of weeks ago this is like the holy grail of metrics. It is the most important metric, and when Google re-updated or re-released Google Analytics, it made it really hard to just track your conversions. I don't know, but myself and all my colleagues, everybody I know in my industry, we're all and still kind of are just beside ourselves wondering what the hell was Google thinking? Yeah, what's it thinking? Google? Anyway, I really don't like Google Analytics anymore. I use Google Search Console much more. However, tracking your conversions, you have to use Google Analytics, and that's the one thing that I would say Google Analytics is still good for is measuring your conversions.

Okay, now how? Yeah, that's the thing, yeah, so when Google came out and they re-released analytics, I spent a lot of time, like I said, trying to figure out how to measure conversions. I did it. I wrote a blog about it. They then changed the method and they did make it a little bit easier, but then. But then the blog that I wrote in the video tutorial I made were no longer valid, so I learned again how to do it the new way. Again, I re-released my own video.

Yes, again, they changed the method. They just try to keep you on your toes. They want to make sure you know. So what I'm going to do now, instead of trying to explain it just in case they change it again, I'm just going to link to the blog that they have now and, oddly enough, they never even had on their blog how to set it up. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, that's why it was so hard. I could not. I scoured YouTube like dozens of videos looking for tutorials myself Couldn't find one. They have one now. That is pretty good, and if they change the method again of how you measure conversions, they will keep this blog updated and I won't have to re-release this podcast. So I'm not going to say exactly what buttons to push, but I'll link to the blog where you can go to figure it out.

And so that's why I didn't mention or that's one of the reasons I didn't mention in the last episode about how you do it, because you can still do the work to improve your conversion rate without actually knowing exactly what your conversion rate is. Does that make sense? But how do we? Yes, well, I talked about how talked. Yeah, yeah, I talked about how to improve it. Oh, okay, that was the. That was, yeah, that was the entire point of the episode Excellent. But you can't. You can make those changes and not necessarily have to know, like, exactly what your.5%. I'm trying to get to 0.6. You can just try to make those same improvements and then assume that it's going to improve your conversion rate, because going ahead and tracking and measuring your conversion rate is kind of an advanced topic now, like it's not that easy, okay, and when you say advanced, how would you differentiate what is advanced and what is not advanced?

Well, like I said, it took me about probably a dozen hours to figure out how to do it, and I'm not, you know, you're not fresh off the bus. I would like to think I kind of know my way around this stuff. Yeah, and it took, it took, it was and it was extremely frustrating. So, if you're, if you're, if you're just starting, oh wow, it's going to be overwhelming. And also, if you are beginning your SEO, if you don't have a lot of traffic yet and you're not getting a lot of conversions. It's not going to be very useful to try to track that number. Okay, because the number is going to be so small that it's going to fluctuate. It really only gets to be useful when you have, I would say, at least several hundred visitors and half a dozen conversions per month, every month at the lowest. It really, if you're at that point, it's not going to help that much to know this number. But if you want to figure out what your conversion rate is and I don't blame you if you do, I would I'd want to know You're going to need Google Analytics installed.

You're going to need to set up what they call an event and then you're going to need to mark that event as being a conversion so that Google knows when that event happens. I know I'll back up. Okay, good, when that event happens, it is a conversion. Now, what that event is is when somebody hits your confirmation page. Remember what your confirmation page is. Confirmation page is the last step that they take and the first step to them becoming. No, that's not right. Your confirmation page is your thank you page. It's what people hit after your content. You need to have that. So you're going to need those two things. You're Google Analytics, you need to have a confirmation page.

And also, I guess the third reason I didn't bring this up is a lot of CRMs like if you have Dubsado or 17 Hats or any of these others, they may just display a thank you message. Like if I fill out if I, as a user on your website, if I fill out the contact form, it may just pop up a message and say like hey, thanks for doing this, we'll get back to you, right? Instead of that, you need to send people to this confirmation page. Some CRMs don't have that option I think most do, but not always. So how do you check? You're just going to have to check with their.

You probably, if you're using Dubsado, I would say I would go to Google and I would say Dubsado, google Analytics, measure conversions, something like that. Hopefully they'll have a blog. If it's not obvious with a search like that, then I would contact their support. Okay, and just say hey, I want to establish conversion tracking in Google Analytics. I want to measure my conversions. This is not an abnormal request. They should be able to help you with this.

If they say anything like oh, you don't need to, we can do that for you, or you can. Just we can't not take it, gary, because things like Squarespace. If you go to Squarespace and say things like this, I know that their support will come back and say, well, we have our own analytics. You go to Squarespace and say things like this, I know that their support will come back and say, well, we have our own analytics, you don't need to use Google Analytics. So if support for whatever platform comes back and says something like that, just say no, I just want to set up Google Analytics. Can you tell me how?

And if they say, well, it's just not possible, then well then it's not possible, but there really should be a way, because this is for any legitimate business running a website measuring conversions is, yeah, very crucial. Yeah, it's something you got to do, unless you're really just beginning, like I said. So that's it, oh yeah, okay, I wanted to keep that short. I want to tell you how to set it up, but also say, if you can't do it, it's not the end of the world, it is a little bit advanced. If your business grows, you'll come up with some sort of method to track this. Excellent.

So if your business is booming, then you need to contact your CRMs. I would say you need probably contact your CRM anyway. It would be nice for Google Analytics to at least be collecting this information as soon as you can, so that down the line, because if you set up conversion tracking now, it's not going to track conversions from yesterday or the day before or two months ago. So you would like to have it at least collecting the information. So by the time you are ready to go and look at it, it's been collecting the information. So I would go to your CRM and say how can I forward users to a confirmation page after the form submission? And you can do that.

Do that search in Google, because there's probably they're going to. If it's possible, they will have it in a blog somewhere. They'll have that question answered. A lot of times it's just a checkbox and then you just enter the URL of whatever you, of wherever you want people to go after they submit your form. Okay, and you want them to go to a thank you page? You want them to go to the confirmation page, the thank you page that you set up on wherever you are Squarespace, wordpress, et cetera. Freaks, yeah, okay, that makes sense. So good luck with it. Yeah, let me know how it goes.