Viral Ad Network

Right, so we’ve covered the basics of Audience, Traffic and Content Reporting in Google Analytics. Now, in the final installment of our 4-part publisher guide we’ll be looking at Goals and Conversions. (Don’t worry folks, we’re nearly finished!)

Figure out what you want to track: Before you do anything with Conversion Reports you need to consider the purpose of your website. Think about whom you want to visit and what you want them to do when they get there. It may be that your goals involve visitors completing specific events like buying a product, signing up to a newsletter or downloading a piece of music. Or perhaps you are more concerned with increasing user engagement, in which case your goals might revolve around length of visit or number of page views.

We recommend that you begin by making a list of all the important actions your visitors can perform. GA allows you to track up to 20 different goals, (although it might be best to just focus on a couple of the most important to start off with, you can always add more later).

Goal Types: Once you decide what your website goals are, you need to understand which ‘goal categories’ they fall into. There are 4 different types of goals that you can track;

(To reach the goal settings; go to your Google Analytics standard reports – click on the “Admin” button in the top right – click on “Goals” –  from one of the Goal sets, click “+ Goal” (goal sets are just a way for you to easily group goals). If you need help on configuring your goal settings, here’s an excellent Google tutorial.)

Funnel Visualisation: Once you have set up your goals it can be useful to track where your visitors are entering or exiting along a chosen conversion path. For example, you might have a 3-part process that visitors need to go through to complete a questionnaire and you want to see if people are dropping off before they get to the end – this is where the URL goal tracking that we mentioned above comes in.

When you set up a URL Goal destination you will get the option to specify the series of pages that you want people to visit in the lead up to the goal conversion. The funnel visualisation will show you how your audience is traveling along this path and allow you to identify possible reasons why they may not go on to complete your destination goal.

Analysing your goals reports: Once you have Goal Tracking configured, Google Analytics will provide you with a wealth of information about whether your visitors are actually doing what you want them to do once they land on your site.

You can use advanced segments to see a top-level view of all traffic sources by conversion goals. You might notice for example, that you are getting a lot of traffic from Twitter but only a small percentage of those people are converting, whereas, maybe you get less visitors from Facebook, but those people are engaging more with your content.

If you drill further into the organic search reports you’ll be able to view conversions by keyword, landing page, search engine, etc.  You can also look further into the referring sites report to see conversions by website and referring URL or use the campaign traffic report to view conversions by ad content, keyword, or destination URL.

All this information can help you identify not just how to drive people to your site, but how to get them to do what you want them to once they arrive.

Hopefully this 4-part series has given you some useful things to think about when it comes to optimising your website. If you’re interested in finding out more about how to make money from hosting ads on your site, why not check out our Publisher pages for details on how you can join the Viral Ad Network and make money from hosting fun viral video ads.

We went through Audience and Traffic Sources Reports in our previous two blog posts about Google Analytics for publishers, now it’s time to get to grips with your content.

3. Optimising Your Web Content

The Site Content Report is one of the most important sections in Google Analytics when it comes to understanding what your audience is interested in and why they are coming to your site. It shows you your most popular pages, broken down by number of views, length of visit and bounce rate, and allows you to see where people are entering and exiting your site.

This is particularly important when it comes to deciding which topics work best for your readers. You’ll find over time that certain blog posts will prove more popular than others, occasionally you might even see an old post continuing to get high numbers of visitors, despite being published months or even years ago. Content like this is worth revisiting and working into new articles.

You might also notice patterns in the bounce rate and average time people are spending on certain blog posts. A high bounce rate or low visit duration for a page might indicate that your content wasn’t what people were expecting, maybe a blog post had a misleading title or your readers didn’t find it interesting or well written and consequently exited the site. This information is incredibly important feedback that you should be using to guide your content strategy.

Site Search: If your site has an internal search function, analytics can tell you some really useful things about what your audience is looking for, and whether they’re finding it. By activating Site Search Tracking you can capture the search terms that your visitors are using. Not only is this helpful when it comes to getting a feel for what people want and planning your future content, but it can also help identify problems with the layout and navigation structure of your pages. For example if you find a lot of people are searching for the term ‘newsletter’, it indicates that they haven’t been able to find an obvious link to it whilst exploring your site, so you might want to think about perhaps adding it to the main navigation bar.

Event tracking: Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page or a screen load. You might have a piece of music or software that users can download from your site, or perhaps you have an embedded  video or game and you want to see how many people are interacting with it.

Downloads, mobile ad clicks, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX embedded elements, and video plays are all examples of actions you might want to track as Events.

Visit the Google Analytics set up guide to find out how to add event tracking to your site.

In Page Analytics: This section of the Content Report allows you to make a visual assessment of how users are interacting with your page. By activating the In Page Analytics view and moving your mouse around the page you can see the number of clicks your links are receiving, find out which areas of your page are getting the most interaction and get an idea about how your page is appearing in your viewers’ browsers.

This information can be really useful when it comes to optimising the layout of your page. Are your viewers seeing the content you want them to see? Are they bothering to scroll down to the bottom of a page? Are your calls to action obvious enough? All things worth considering if you want to boost your audience engagement.

Step 4: Setting goals and conversions