Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [259]
View Your Reports According to the Goals
Now that you have goal conversions set up in your analytics, the reports will take on an entirely different meaning. The Goals tab in the left navigation of Google Analytics will provide conversion information, and other reports will include this data as well.
In the Traffic Sources by Keywords report, the information displays the top keywords by number of visitors and shows the typical information of time on site, pages viewed, and bounce rate for your site as a whole (Figure 21-3a). However, now that you’ve added your goals, there are new tabs just above the information columns. The Site Usage tab was the only available view prior to adding the goals, so it is now the default tab. If you have named your goals, the tab will reflect the name of the goal, as in the AdSense Revenue tab shown in Figure 21-3a. If you have not named your goals, then they will default to “Goal Set 1.” Clicking the tab for one of your goals will display the site usage data, but within the context of the goals you have created. Any individual goals that are part of the goal set will also show up as a field in the information. As shown in Figure 21-3, Place Classified Ad is included as a secondary goal in Goal Set 2.
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Figure 21-3: The addition of goal measurement provides the necessary context to evaluate successful (or profitable) visits.
Now the information takes on a completely new meaning. Rather than simply looking at the number of visitors for a particular keyword, you can measure the effectiveness of a particular keyword in terms of conversions. You are now reporting on performance against goals, rather than reporting mere data! All kinds of valuable information can be drawn from evaluating your data based on goal completion. Adding more data to reports like these also provides a unique outlook, which enables more profitable decisions to be made.
As an example of adding more information, the drop-down box to the right of the keyword drop-down box allows you to view the keywords by source. This additional information enables you to see which keywords in which search engines are doing the most work to provide you the best business. This way, you should be able to find the keywords that are bringing in lots of visitors but converting very few. This provides the direction you need to focus on when developing a plan to improve the experience for this keyword or when choosing more profitable keywords.
To gain perspective on additional keywords and their performance, you can click the column headings to order the information. Clicking Goal Conversion Rate will toggle the order of rows to show you the keywords with conversion rates ordered from highest to lowest or lowest to highest. However, as discussed in Chapter 19, I find that those with the highest rates are usually keywords that bring in very few visitors (see Figure 21-4).
Figure 21-4: The pages with the highest conversion rates may show only a few visitor referrals.
You may have to page through thousands of keywords in order to gain some perspective on which keywords produced high visitor numbers and high conversion rates. Fortunately, Google provides an ordering mechanism for this massive amount of data called the weighted sort. With the weighted sort, the report information is developed based on a threshold of visitors to conversions. Essentially, it eliminates the reports that have 100 percent conversion rates and one visitor, or 0 percent conversion rates and one visitor, and instead displays the information that is most helpful (see Figure 21-5). Seeing that 200 visitors were brought to the site without a single conversion provides a significant direction for a site owner. This direction involves evaluating the content, design, and other factors outlined in this book but directed at a specific segment of visitors based