How to Start Measuring Conversions in Your E-shop

Do you know where customers who purchased from your e-shop come from? Or on the contrary, do you know how many of your potential customers decided not to order your products for some reason? The answer to these questions can be found in your Google Analytics account.

What is a conversion?

A conversion, or the conversion of visitors to customers, is the most important indicator of the success of your site, and not necessarily only for purchases in an e-shop. In fact, a conversion can be any target, activity or action you want your visitors to do.

Some examples of conversions are:
– Signing up to a newsletter
– Becoming a Facebook fan
– Commenting on an article or post
– Registering for a service
– Signing a petition
– Visiting a store in a physical location
– Completing a questionnaire or survey…

A conversion can simply be any visitor activity on your site that leads to a goal you have set.

Why measure conversions?

If you want to use your website to achieve certain goals, conversion tracking will help you in reaching them more effectively.

1) You’ll find the source of the conversion

With tracking, you can detect the best source of quality customers for conversions and optimize your return on investment (ROI). The source of such conversions may come from a search engine, or from clicks on an ad. When you invest in advertising on Google, you are able to clearly quantify which ad brought more customers and as a result, profits.

2) You can optimize the purchasing process

This means that you can effectively determine at what point your customer stopped and did not finish the order. If you find that most of the customers stopped at the page with the order form, take a look and see what discouraged them. Maybe you’ll discover an error on the form, such as not being able to place an order, or there are certain conditions that make your visitors leave after reading them. The results of Google Analytics will help you measure the percentage of success of your activities. And to be able to monitor all of this, you need to first set the goals.

How to set up goals in a GA account

Now let’s move on to the more technical side of our article to see what and how you should make the settings to measure your conversions.

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account and click on the “Admin” in the upper right corner.

2. In “Profile” create “New Profile”.

3. Choose a name for the new profile, such as the website name.

4. In “Goals”, add a new destination by clicking on the “+ Goal.” You can create up to a total of 20 goals.

5. The goal is created by adding the part of the URL after the domain name of your site. For example, for http://my-online-shop.webnode.com/order/, add /order/. Paste this address as the destination URL.

6. If you click on “Reporting”, go to “Traffic Sources” -> “Sources” -> “All Traffic” and select “Goal Set 1”. You will see the resources that brought customers to your website and also you will see the conversion ratio, that is, the percentage of those who have met your intended target.

Helpful Hint: If you want to measure conversions in your eshop, select a target page with an order form completed, such as “/es-order-finished/”.
If you are unsure what goals to choose for your specific site, ask us in comments below this article.

Share your experience with Google Analytics with us! Now you know how to measure conversions so do not hesitate to start your own online store, just check our guide.