Do you know how much value your website adds to your business?
In this post we will look at using Google Analytics Goal Tracking to easily measure the value your website generates for your business.
Why track value?
Value gives you clarity. A lot of websites are operating in the dark, they serve a purpose but the real value of the site is unknown.
By tracking value, you can make better decisions on where to focus your time and effort when it comes to selling products or services online.
What can you track?
Nearly everything that you can track with Google Analytics can be associated with a tracking goal but here’s an overview of the main things people usually track:
- Product sales – The amount of revenue generated from product sales.
- Enquiry form submissions – When someone fills out a form on your website to send an e-mail to you.
- Mailing list sign up – When someone enters their e-mail address to join your mailing list.
- Button clicks – When someone clicks a button to perform a specific action. E.G. Share a blog post on social media.
You can find out more about Goal Tracking using Google Analytics from Google.
When someone completes out any of the above actions, we call that a conversion. Now we will look at how to work out a value for each conversion.
How to calculate the value of a conversion
This step will take a bit of mathematics:
- Let’s say you get 250 enquiries through your website contact form.
- Of those 250 people, 100 purchase one of your products or services.
- Let’s say the average spend per customer is £100.
- That tells us the enquiries through your website makes £10,000 per month on average.
- Divide the average monthly revenue (£10,000) by the total number of contact form enquiries (250). We can average that for every person who fills out a contact form on your website, you will make £40.
It might be difficult to get an exact figure of spend per customer but pick something realistic and work with that.
Configuring a goal in Google Analytics
Now that you have the average value per conversion you can set up a goal and add the value.
If you are familiar with the admin interface on Google Analytics, you can configure new goals by going to Admin > Goals > New Goal within your Analytics Property.
Google have a full guide on how configure goals on their support site.
If you are not a regular analytics user and would like to know more about how to set up a goal please feel free to contact us and we can help you with this.
Conclusion
Now that you have proper goal tracking set up, with associated values, you can generate reports which will show you exactly how much value your website has generated.
If you have a business website, and you want to generate new business through it, you should be tracking the value.
It’s important to note that you need to invest in marketing your website to see real results. That might come in the form of your own time or budget allocated to an agency.
The good thing is it will now be easier to see a return on your investment!
Happy tracking.
