Increasing Conversions with Google Analytics

Google Analytics funnel
visualization helps you see
where your users are dropping out
of the checkout flow.

One of the key benefits of digital publishing with Tizra is that you have direct access to exceptionally detailed information about how people are interacting with your content using standard web analytics tools.  Because Tizra treats every page of every document as a separate web page, you know not only which publications are popular, but which PARTS of those publications are getting the most traffic.

It’s a great opportunity to learn more about your users, and to understand the basic forces driving the success of your online publishing efforts.  Plus it’s easy (not to mention addictive), and there are some great free tools available to help.

In this post, we’ll provide step-by-step instructions on setting up Google Analytics to work with your Tizra account, and drill down on the Google Analytics Goals features that are particularly useful in measuring the success of your promotional efforts. 

In case you’re not familiar with web analytics, it's basically about recording and analyzing information that web browsers send when they request content from a website.  Some of the key metrics you can track include… 

• Pages viewed: Lets you see the relative popularity of each page on your site.  This is where Tizra’s highly granular content delivery provides special advantages.
• Visits: Number of visits (or more precisely, user sessions)  on your site within a given period. 
• Visitors: Number of individual people (browsers). 
• Pageviews: Total number of pages viewed by users. 
• Pages/Visit: Average number of pages requested each time someone visits your site. Useful in determining how engaged users are with your content. 
• Sources: How people are finding their way to your site, including links from other sites, social media and search engines like Google. 

Of course, the most important metric for many publishers is, How many users are buying my content, or registering on my site?  To help with this, Google Analytics has a powerful feature called Goals.  Goals make it easy for you to keep track of these key measures of success, and help you backtrack so you can understand where your successes are coming from, and pinpoint problems that may be preventing users from converting.

So, for example, a Goals report might show that 100 users landed on an offer page for a particular ebook. From there, three users added the offer to their shopping cart; two initiated a credit card purchase; and one sale went all the way through. With these analytics in hand, Tizra’s flexibility then makes it easy for you to improve whatever part of the process is not working.

For example, maybe you want to experiment with changing the aforementioned offer so that more visits to the ebook’s offer are converted into sales. You might decide to experiment with a 3-tiered pricing structure: one price for one month of online access; another price for one year of online access; and a third price for perpetual online access with a PDF chapter download included. Whatever types of changes you decide to make, Tizra makes them easy to do quickly, and Analytics Goals help you continue to make informed decisions about what changes are most effective.

Setting Up Google Analytics -- Step-by-Step

1. Visit Google Analytics website to sign up for a new account. Click the Create Account button and follow the on-screen instructions.
   
   
2. After you’ve filled out all the fields on the What would you like to track screen, click the Get Tracking ID button at the bottom of the page.
   
   
3. Copy the Google Analytics Tracking ID onto the clipboard.
   The Tracking ID is formatted as: UA-XXXXXXXX-Y.
   
   
   
   Note: Once your Google Analytics Account is set up, you can find the Tracking ID by clicking the Admin button in the upper right corner of any Google Analytics screen, then selecting the appropriate Google Analytics account property, and then clicking the Tracking Info tab.
4. Next, open up Tizra and from the control panel, go to REPORTING > Google Analytics Reporting.
5. Take what you copied in step 3 and paste it into the Tracking Code field.
   Optionally, you can add a Description to the Tracking Code, which might include information about who set up the account and when.
   
   
   
   Note: Tizra can be set up to support tracking from multiple Google Analytics Account Profiles, which is useful if there are different departments within your organization that need separate access to data. 
   
   Bear in mind that when you add new Profiles, they don't include retrospective data, so you'll want to have at least one with continuity all the way back to the beginning.
6. Click Save at the bottom of the Tizra screen.
   Google Analytics will typically have reporting available within 24 hours.

Setting Up Google Analytics Goals

1. Click the Admin button at the top right of any Google Analytics screen.
   
2. On the Account Administration screen, click the appropriate Account name.
   If you have a lot of Accounts or Properties, use the search field above the Account name(s).
3. From the list of Account Properties, select the appropriate Property.
   When you set up your new Account, you also added the web site Property you wished to see reports for. You can optionally add additional Properties.
   
4. From the Profiles list, select the Profile you want to add the Goal to.
   
   
   Note: A Profile lets you "define which data is available from your web site Property, and also specify a list of users who can see that data in reports. The first Profile that Analytics creates for a web site Property has no filters, so all  your data is available in at least one profile. Create additional profiles and filter the data for those profiles as necessary."
5. Click the Goals tab from the Profiles menu.
6. Click +Goal to add a goal to one of the Goal sets.
7. Enter the values in the fields as listed (and pictured) below:
   Goal Name: Successfully Complete Purchase
   Goal Type: URL
   Goal URL: /commerce/success
   Match Type: Head Match
   Case Sensitive: <unchecked>
   Goal Value: <leave blank>
   
   Note: If you would like to track conversions for a particular purchase Offer, you can append the Offer ID to the end of the Goal URL.  For example, if the Offer ID was 1234, the Goal URL would be /commerce/success/1234.  (The Offer ID can be found on the Offer Properties screen in parentheses.)
8. Enter the values in the fields as listed (and pictured) below: 
   URL: /commerce/step1Name: 1-Arrive at Payment Form
   Required step: <check the box>
   
9. Click +Goal Funnel Step.
   
10. Complete the newly displayed Step 2 fields as follows:
    URL: /commerce/step2Name: 2-Arrive at Confirmation Page
    
11. Click the Save button to save your Goal and two Funnels.
12. To view your Goals Analytics, click the Standard Reporting tab and ten click the Conversions section of the left-hand menu. Select from that menu the Goal Reporting you'd like to view.