Ecommerce websites typically track a metric called conversion rate. This is the percentage of visitors that purchase the product. For example, if 100 customers visit a product page and 10 of them click to purchase, the conversion rate would be 10%.
As professional services marketers, we like to borrow this metric and apply it to the service world. Except instead of tracking purchases, we are tracking the percentage of visitors that contact us through our site. In other words, we are tracking online leads. By tracking the number of leads that come in through your website, you can directly measure the site as a lead generating tool.
Often, service companies look at their analytics and focus on the number of visitors coming to the site. One day you have 300 visitors, and the next day you have 500. That’s an improvement, right? Although it’s exciting, it is important to look deeper and evaluate the quality of that traffic. Common ways to do this are to look at average time visitors are spending on the site, the number of pages visitors are viewing, and the number of visitors that “converted” into a lead by filling out a contact form. An increase in traffic is not helpful to you if it is not leading more leads.
An easy way to track your form conversions is to set up a goal in Google Analytics. Once a goal is set up for this action, you will be notified every time the form is filled. In addition, you will know what website the visitor came from and what path they took to get to the form. This video shows you how to set up a goal in Google Analytics: http://www.flyteblog.com/flyte/2009/05/how-to-set-up-goals-in-google-analytics-video.html
Once you have a goal set up, you can see which types of traffic are converting into leads. For example, you can examine how important your LinkedIn traffic is compared to your Twitter traffic:
Traffic Source | Visits | Goal Conversions | Conversion Rate |
167 | 4 | 2.0% | |
489 | 1 | 0.2% |
Although the traffic to the website in this example coming from Twitter is much more substantial, it is producing a lower goal conversion rate. Because LinkedIn is producing a higher percentage of form fills, perhaps it’s time to focus more on LinkedIn.
Do you use goals to track the effectiveness of your professional services website?
