Carla Pendergraft

 Google Analytics Course Info  The Purchase Journey & Path to Conversion  Tracking Events in Google Analytics

 Free Course offered by Google  Video Based   22 videos of 3-10 min. each.  Takes 4-6 hours to complete  There is a test!

 This course is only an introduction and give you no credentials.  Additional courses are available if you want to obtain certification:  Google Analytics Individual Qualification (“GAIQ”) 

 Ecommerce –sell products  Content Publishing – show ads to visitors  Brand – drive awareness and engagement  Lead generation – obtain contact info for salespeople  Informational sites – help people find info

 There is probably a typical path a visitor would take through your website if they are a serious buyer.  For a lawn care company, they might come to the home page, click on your Services page, then click on your PDF entitled “7 Tips to Choosing the Best Lawn Care Company.”  Then they might go to your pricing page, then fill out a quote request form.

 So your goal is to get them to take that buyer path through your website, step by step.  The PDF download is an example of a micro- conversion.  It’s a step on the way toward becoming a buyer.

 In comparison, a non-buyer might come to your home page and immediately leave.  That’s a “Bounce.”  Or they might download your PDF called, “Do It Yourself Lawn Care.”

 You can learn a lot by studying the path visitors take through your site.  From the Dashboard, go to Audience – Visitor Flow  Let’s look at mine as an example.

 Look at the page they exit from.  Did they not find what they were looking for?  Should we put something more there?  I found many people were looking through my site and then exiting at the Pay page.  Pay page is for current customers who want to use a credit card to pay.  I surmised they were looking for Pricing, so I added a Pricing page.

 Think about the buying process for your product  What can you give your customer to keep them in the buying process, yet move them forward?

 Macro conversions – a product is sold  Micro conversions – customer takes a positive step forward, toward the goal  They download a PDF: “How to choose a lawn care company”  They click on a YouTube video: “7 Ways We can Winterize Your Car”  They click on an image that links to your business’s Facebook profile

 We can add some code to specific links on a website and then track the clicks on those links.  We can use an Event Code Generator to automatically generate the code  Then we put the code in the link itself (requires some HTML knowledge)

 _Google_analytics.php

 Category  PDFs  Videos  Buttons  Action  Click_this_link, Download, Play_video  Label  Additional info such as “orange button” or “green button”. Optional.

 Create a test page on your website  Put a PDF, a YouTube video, and a photo with a link to something else.  Use the code generator to create an individualized event tracking code for each of these items  Place the unique code on each link  Now click on each link a few times  Wait a day or two  Look in your Google Analytics  Dashboard – Behavior - Events