Last Updated: May 20, 2022

Getting traffic to your website is one thing but getting it to convert is a totally different ball game.

You may be getting millions of visitors to your website each month but if they are adding little to no value to the business bottomline then your cost per acquisition will remain high and your gross profit would remain low.

In order to make your business a success, you need to focus on increasing revenue and decreasing cost per acquisition/conversion.

The home page is the top landing page for many websites.

So if the home page is your top landing page then you would like to know how people go through the conversion funnel once they land on this page.

The best way of doing this is by looking into the ‘Goal Flow’ report in Google Analytics and then identifying and removing the bottlenecks in your conversion funnels:

Look for drop off in conversion funnel from one step to the next; determine the reason for the drop off and what could be done about it.

If you are optimizing your shopping cart experience then the goal flow report is of great help.

Make sure once a person adds an item to the shopping cart, he/she completes the checkout on your website. You can do this by identifying and removing the bottlenecks in your checkout funnel and through remarketing.

If you could make more people reach the shopping cart page, you could generate more sales.

Now the problem is, you don’t know which website visitors proceeded to the shopping cart page from the home page and which didn’t.

You have got a lot of questions:

1. Were they, the visitors from organic search?
2. Were they, the visitors from paid search?
3. Were they, the visitors from social media?
4. How many visitors viewed a particular product category page before they added items to the shopping cart?
5. How many visitors viewed a particular product detail page before they added items to the shopping cart?

Without segmenting the conversion funnel there is nothing much you can do about the drop off from one step to the next in a conversion funnel.

Fortunately, Google Analytics allows applying custom/advanced segments to the Goal flow report.

Following are my top 14 advanced segments:

Apply these advanced segments one by one to your goal flow report and then find drop-offs from one step to the next. 

Once you know the reason for the drop off from one step to the next and which funnel page(s) need to be optimized, only then you start your testing (A/B testing, usability testing, etc) and/or optimization of marketing campaigns.

Another smart way to segment conversion funnels is to create and use filtered view for each major traffic source/medium for your website:

Once you have created filtered views then use the goal flow report of each filtered view for conversion funnel analysis.

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