Adding Conversions or Goals to your Google Analytics to Measure Email Signups or Newsletter Signups

Adding goals or conversions is something that every person with Google Analytics should do. This applies to pretty much every web site regardless if it's an e-commerce site or not.

Why should you care about goals? Because at some point you will do something to promote your website. Even if it's as simple as linking to your site from Facebook. Or as complex as paying for advertising through a vendor or paid campaigns on your own. You will somehow market this site.

Conversions (goals) will show you which methodology that you used gave you the best return for your investment of money and/or time. 

First we have to decide which metrics will work best for you. If you have an eCommerce site, it's pretty easy to pick your first goal. You will want to measure revenue. The second most common thing to measure is people taking action such as filling out a form for more information, or signing up for an email blast.

Even if you have none of these goals on your site, you can decide on metrics that will help you measure the value of each site visit. Maybe you know that if they visit more than 3 pages, they are serious. Maybe you want to know if the visitor watched a video. We will address these conversions in our next posts. 

For today we are going to set up conversion monitoring for people that come to your site and entered their info into a form to get emails or newsletters from you. 

You do need to make sure that you have a Thank You page that shows to people upon their completion of your forms. I still have clients that use more old school web platforms that are set up to NOT redirect to a separate thank you page. Fortunately most that I have seen were able to adjust their settings and make it direct to a thank you page.
What if you don't have a thank you page? I have been asked if you can just measure traffic to the email sign up page itself. Yes you can BUT you won't know if people got to that page and then dropped out before completing anything. This is not a true metric for success. If you got 15 people from Facebook to go to that page, and 4 people from Twitter to go to that page.... and 3 of the 4 Twitter people actually complete the form and only 1 from Facebook does, then Twitter is really worth more of your time and you won't know that from just traffic.

So now we are going to set up the goal in your Analytics. If you don't have Analytics yet, click here.

Sign in to your Google Analytics account and click on Admin. 
On the right side of your admin page will be a list of options and you are going to want to choose "Goals". 

Click on New Goal

Select Newsletter Sign Up and Continue

Add your campaign description. If you have more than one newsletter or sign up spot, make this name unique to that form. Select Destination as your type and the continue button. 

Here's where you add the exact URL address of the Thank You page that you are measuring. Copy-pasting it from your web browser is best practice. 

For the time being, we will not use the Value tabs. That's for a bit down the road when we have gotten better at Analytics and our Goals. 

Click save and you have done it! It brings you back to your Goals list. If you go into your Analytics, especially under acquisitions, you will notice the conversion columns (last 3 columns on the right) and over the next few days your site traffic will start being measured against the goals completed in addition to your every day traffic numbers.

Soon you will know how many goals are completed and how those people got to your site.

You will also be able to measure conversion rates if you chose to use UTM codes to help distinguish between vendors or advertising methods. 

It may be very tempting to plop a whole bunch of new goals in right now, but please try to wait. Too many goals and metrics will water down the value of what you are trying to do. 

Down the road we will be adding values to these goals and you need to stay organized and understand how each of these goals impacts your business. 

At this point, only add additional goals if you have additional news letter or forms on your site. Stop after that for today and let the numbers start processing. 

Your next thought should be what the value is of each person on your email list. Do you email regularly? Do you know what your email open rate is? Do you know how many people respond to offers that you email?

We'll cover this in future blogs, too.

For now... CONGRATULATIONS on advancing your marketing skills and becoming that much closer to really making a difference in your business!

Let us know how you did~