How to Track Website Conversion Rates with Google Analytics?

One of easiest and best ways to track conversion rates on your website is with Google Analytics. This can be achieved by setting up “Goals” in Google Analytics. A step by step description is given below. The concept of conversion tracking using this approach is fairly simple. It involves tracking a given action by monitoring the total number of views of its corresponding thank you page.

Step 1: Create a Confirmation Page (“Thank You” Page)

Before you can start tracking conversion rates on your website, you need to create a confirmation page or thank you page for the action you wish to track. It can be an order confirmation when a sale is made or a thank you page when a user signs-up to your newsletter depending on what you wish to track. I want to track conversion rate of enquiries received on my website so I have created a confirmation page displayed to users when they complete the “call me back” form on my website.

How to Create a Thank You/Confirmation page?

If you use a content management system such as Joomla or WordPress, you can easily create a new page from the administration panel. Copy the public link or URL for this page and keep it handy. You will need to enter this in Google Analytics in the next step. Make sure this page cannot be accessed directly via your website menu as you don’t want users to access this page directly. If you don’t use a CMS, then you can create a simple HTML page informing the user that the action has been performed successfully. e.g. Thank you for registering for our newsletter or  Your payment has been successful.

Step 2: Set-up Redirects to Your Confirmation Page

You then need to make sure users are redirected to the confirmation or thank you page when they perform the action you wish to track on your website. If you are tracking conversion rates for product sales, then you can configure your payment gateway to redirect users to your custom thank you page upon successful payment. You can do this easily in PayPal, other payment gateways or in the Newsletter service or sign-up form is this is what you wish to track.

Step 3: Set Up Goals in Google Analytics

Once you have the necessary redirects set-up, the final step is to configure goal tracking in Google Analytics.

Depending on whether you are using the old or new Google Analytics Interface, the link to access and set-up goals may be slightly different. Log into your Google Analytics account and follow the steps below to configure goals and start tracking conversions.

1. In the old Interface, you need to first click on “edit” button next to your website listing.

2. “Goals” will be listed towards middle of this page. Next to it will be the option to “Add Goal”. Click on it. On the new Google Anlytics interface, Goals is listed under “Conversions” on the left menu. (See image above)

3. Enter a name for your goal for future reference. Use something descriptive e.g. subscriptions or sales. In my case I have named it “Call-Back Requests” as this is what I am tracking on my website. In the “Goal Type” field Select “URL Destination”.

4. Under “Match type” select “Exact match” and enter your goal URL. This is the URL of the thank you page or confirmation page you have created.

That’s all. You are all set to track conversion rate for any time period. You can do this by clicking on the Goals tab on your Google Analytics dashboard. It may take up to a day to start collecting data.

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