Lesson 1: Why Do You Have a Website?

5 minute read: Focus on your most important site visitors – those who do exactly what you want them to do on your site. Lesson 1 of 5.

The key to making sense of Google Analytics is to focus.

Focus on the most important visitors to your site, the ones who buy your stuff, download your reports, donate to your nonprofit, subscribe to your email newsletter.

In this session, we’ll start to focus by answering a simple question:

Why do you have a website?

This isn’t a trick question, and there are no right or wrong answers.

Here’s why I am asking:

Once you are clear about what you want people to do on your site, and set up Google Analytics to track that behaviour, everything else about using this tool will make much more sense.

Getting useful insights from Google Analytics will almost become intuitive.

So let’s look at some common answers to the question ‘why do you have a website?’:

1. I want to sell products or raise donations.
2. I want to generate leads for my business.
3. I want to raise awareness of my product or issue.

Take thirty seconds to come up with your own one sentence answer. Think of why you have a website, what is it you want people to do?

Don’t overthink it – you already know the answer.

You might even have more than one answer, but keep it under three. We’re focusing here, remember?

Got it? Good.

Now I want you to think of what activities visitors take on your website that would indicate ‘success’.

For the above examples it could be:

1. Visitors buy a product or make a donation
2. Qualified customers contact us for a quote or to initiate a conversation
3. Visitors engage with and share our content

So now you have a definition of a ‘successful’ visit to your website. It is the key first step in making sense of Google Analytics.

Write it down.

Write down what a successful website visit looks like.

We are going to use Google Analytics to track this as a ‘conversion’, which in the context of online marketing we will define as:

‘a conversion occurs when a website visitor takes the action we designed our site to facilitate.’

Google Analytics is particularly good at tracking conversions on your website, and showing you how you might get more of them. In fact that is what is is designed to do.

So now you have your first conversion defined. In the next session, I will show you how to convert that into a ‘goal’ that you can track in great detail in Google Analytics. This helps you focus on your most importance site visitors: those who convert.

But while we’re thinking about conversions and goals, it’s helpful to dig one level deeper before the end of this session.

You and I both know that regardless of how well you have designed your site, how engaging your content and how clear and compelling your ‘call to action’ is, the majority of visits won’t result in a conversion.

But we still want to be able to focus on those visitors who are likely to one day take the plunge and convert. They do things on your site that indicate they are interested in converting, but not quite yet. That’s why we are going to define these behaviours as ‘microconversions’.

Some examples of microconversions:

• The first time a visitor comes to your site, they may spend a lot of time on the site, checking out several pages.
• They may follow you on social media, or subscribe to your email updates.
• They may visit your ‘request a quote’ page, but not follow through with their original intent.

We want to track these ‘microconversions’.

We want Google Analytics to be able to tell us how these likely converts are behaving on our site, where they come from and what we can do to get more of them.

Over the long term, these visitors who ‘almost’ convert can tell us just as much about how to improve our site as the visitors who did the right thing and converted.   That’s why we define and track microconversions.

So I want you to write down, for each conversion you have defined, a few key behaviours (or behaviors without a ‘u’ if you are in the USA) that indicate someone is on the path to converting.

To put it another way: write down some behaviours that indicate that site visitors are moving closer to doing what you want them to do.

For the above examples, here are some likely microconversions:

Conversion : Visitors buy a product or make a donation

• microconversion : Visitor clicks on ‘buy now’ or ‘donate’ links
• microconversion : Visitor signs up to your email updates
• microconversion : Visitor asks a clarifying question via email after visiting a particular product page

Conversion : Qualified customers contact us for a quote or to initiate a conversation

• microconversion : Visitor clicks on ‘get a quote’ or ‘contact us’ links
• microconversion : Visitor spends significant time on the ‘services we offer’ page
• microconversion : Visitor asks a question from the contact page on the site

Conversion : Visitors engage with and share our content

• microconversion : Visitor spends significant time on your site, and visits several pages
• microconversion : Visitor returns to your site several times
• microconversion : Visitor Likes or follows you on social media

Don’t keep all this in your head. Here is a simple worksheet to download, in PDF format, to help keep track of your conversions and microconversions.

Take some time to fill in these answers, but don’t overthink this. It’s more important to get tracking conversions and microconversions in Google Analytics than to have it perfect the first time.

Once you have a clear sense of one or more conversions for your site, and a few microconversions, you are ready to move on to the next topic in this tutorial: Conversions and Goals in Google Analytics.

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