Google Analytics Tutorial - How to track conversion rates » Adam Taylor

Google Analytics Tutorial - How to track conversion rates

Posted on 19 June 2007
Tags: Google Analytics Tutorial

Conversion goals are one of the more advanced and most powerful features of Google Analytics. They allow you to see how well, certain defined actions, are performing; e.g. how many people are signing up to your newsletter, or how many people are buying your products.

Setting up conversion goals

To set up conversion goals to track conversion rates follow these steps :

Once logged into the Google Analytics account select ‘Analytics Settings’ and ‘Edit’ for the site you wish to create goals for – in here you are able to create up to four conversion goals per
site profile.
Here you need to select a goal to edit/create and then enter each step [URL] in the process you wish to track. For example the URLs might be:
So you would enter those URLs as each step in your goal with the final [confirmation] page as the goal URL.
If you know the value of a goal you can also input this to see revenue information in Google Analytics

Setting up conversion goals for processes with non-unique URLs

When I was unaware you could set up conversion goals for processes where all the steps had the same URL, I altered the process to use unique URLs. However, in Google Analytics it is still perfectly possible to track conversion rates on pages with non-unique URLs. For example, if the goal steps where like this:

So where a script is calling in different templates for each step in the process it is still possible to track these by making a call to the urchinTracker Javascript function within each step (with an onload event - <body onload=”urchinTracker()”>) as follows:

urchinTracker(”/funnel_G1/step1.html”)
urchinTracker(”/funnel_G1/step2.html”)
urchinTracker(”/funnel_G1/step3.html”)

Then you would set up the goal steps as follows:

Tracking URLs with unique user data appended

If you wish to track URLs that include unique user data such as:

http://example.com/signup?page=1;id=123;name=test;session=xas21sddf341

You must select ‘Head Match’ from the options in the goal set up and then only put the URL to just before the unique data, so for the example above, the goal step would be:

http://example.com/signup?page=1

And then it will ignore any other unique data after.