Joomla! Documentation™

Every business is different so the metrics you use to analyse whether your site is performing might vary. What is vital, however, is that you consider what you want to gain from your website, and how you can measure success. For E-commerce sites it is fairly easy to see what measures of success we might expect – people buying products, customers returning to the store to buy again, email newsletter campaigns resulting in more sales.

In the business-to-business market, it's not so clear cut. We might consider someone filling out a form to be a conversion – or maybe picking up the phone to call. How can we track that?

Using Goals to Monitor Performance

The simple answer to how we can monitor conversions is through using goals and in the case of E-commerce, enabling the E-commerce features both on our website so that it sends the appropriate information to Google Analytics and in Analytics itself to ensure you have the correct currency set, and so forth.

Goals can either be a single event, or a chain of events – known as a goal funnel – which result in an event which you consider to be a 'converted' visitor. This might be signing up for a newsletter, contacting you, adding a product to the cart, checking out. There can be multiple goals, and often there are.

In my case, for our extension site Virya Software we have goals set up for each extension, in addition to a few others which we're interested in such as adding support requests, browsing more than x pages, viewing the demo, subscribing to our newsletter, and so forth.

The goal funnel is the process through which the customer passes before they get to the 'final' conversion URL. An example:

1. Product landing page
2. Buy now page
3. Checkout
4. Conversion landing page

In this funnel, we track where people drop out of the purchasing system and thus identify problems. We can see, for example, if the 'check out' button isn't clear on the Buy Now page. Perhaps the customer can't find required information on the checkout page. Maybe they drop out to go and find it. Resolving the issues will potentially increase our conversion rate.

Boosting your conversion rate is often the easiest way to increase revenue – and quicker than getting more people to visit. If you have a conversion rate of say 2% from 100 visitors, it's quite a challenge to increase the number of visitors sufficiently to see a return on investment, but it's often not too difficult to increase the conversion rate. That will benefit us as we increase the number of visitors.