Many of our clients are focused on Direct-To-Consumer (D2C) sales and one of the things that surfaces in strategy talk is how to identify and track the right types of actions and goals on your site in order to make better business decisions.
Google Analytics is the most common platform we see being used for reports. So we’ll be referencing their product for the rest of this post — but the same types of goals and events are important regardless of which platform you use).
Even though the emphasis is on sales, it’s important to measure micro conversions that happen at your store. These are actions taking place on your website by potential customers that signal interest in your products. They might not be ready to buy, but you’ve got their attention!
Here are examples that gauge interest that we see with our own clients…
- Account signups
- Newsletter signups
- Time on site (5 minutes or more)
- Viewed a product page or “add to cart”
- Live chat sessions
- Contact form submissions
- Downloading an ebook or file
- Watching a video
Micro conversions can be tracked in several ways. We can set most of these up as goals (directly or from existing events) in Google Analytics – see our post on Four Types Of Custom Google Analytics Goals You Need To Know. This way, you’ll be able to run various reports with segments for demographics, locations, devices, traffic source, campaigns or landing pages and see which goals and events are being triggered, how often and then focus more on activities that lead to sales!
We always recommend setting up all your goals, e-commerce and events in Google Analytics and then importing the key goals and transaction into your Google Ads accounts. For this to happen, simply connect Google Ads to Google Analytics (using the same Google Account). Then in Google Ads conversion tracking, you’ll see the options when importing conversions.
Note: Phone call tracking such as “calls from ads”, “call-only ads” and “calls to a phone number on your website” can only be setup in Google Ads at this time. So that data won’t be available in Google Analytics yet.