The goal conversion rate of a website is 61.99%.

Ok good. But what insight you can get from it and what action you can take?

The short and sweet answer is ‘nothing much’.

“Google Analytics add the conversion rate of each individual Goal and then report the sum as the overall conversion rate of the website. “

So if you have set up 5 goals for your website and the conversion rate of each goal turned out to be 20%, then Google Analytics will report 100% conversion rate for your website.

So technically you have reached marketing nirvana. Go home, play video games or do whatever you like because your website can’t perform any better as it is able to convert all the website traffic into sales/leads.

But the reality is that your website can still perform much better. If you use Google Analytics, you can have Goal conversion rate of 125%, you can have a goal conversion rate of 500% and you can still be massively underperforming.

This is because in aggregate form you will never know which goal has contributed the most to your overall site conversion rate and whether the biggest contributor really has the biggest impact on your bottom-line.

For example, consider the following scenario:

Goal-1: Visit to the ‘Newsletter’ page

Goal-2: Visit to the ‘About Us’ Page

Goal-3: Visit to the ‘Order Confirmation’ Page.

Goal-1 Conversion Rate: 40.49%

Goal-2 Conversion Rate: 20.19%

Goal-3 Conversion Rate: 1.31%

In many industries, the Goal which have biggest impact on the bottom-line is the visit to the ‘order confirmation’ page (the page which is shown to a visitor when he/she completes a transaction).

The conversion rate of this goal is 1.31%. If you ignore this conversion rate and instead take the overall site conversion rate into account (which is 61.99%) then you will never know how your website is really performing. So it is very important that you

“Segment your overall Goal Conversion Rate and look at the conversion rate of each goal.”

Analyze & Report Conversion Rate of each Goal

To see the conversion rate of each Goal, login to your GA account, go to ‘Goals Overview’ report and then select the Goal (whose conversion rate you want to analyse) from the ‘All Goals’ drop down menu:

But even after all this segmentation, it is still sub-optimal way of analysing conversion rates as you can’t take any action from such data. Therefore you need to segment this conversion rate further and analyse conversion rate of each goal for each traffic source.

 Related Post: Common Google Analytics Mistakes that kill your Reporting 

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Report and Analyze Conversion Rate of each Traffic Source for each Goal

Go to ‘All Traffic’ > Source / Medium report in your Google Analytics account and then click on the ‘Goal Set 1’ tab.

You will see a report similar to the one below:

You now get the better picture of your website performance.

The questions that you should be asking now are:

What is the conversion rate of my goal named ‘Visit to partner with us page’ for organic traffic and is there any improvement in this conversion rate in the last one month?

In other words you are determining how the traffic through organic search has impacted one of your website goal. If the goal conversion rate has gone down with the increase in organic traffic then maybe you are not targeting the right keywords?

What is the conversion rate of my goal named ‘Visit to about us page’ for email traffic and is there any improvement in this conversion rate in the last one month?

In other words you are determining how the traffic through email campaign has impacted your website goal. If goal conversion rate has gone down with the increase in email traffic then maybe you are not targeting the right people?

So instead of analysing and monitoring the overall conversion rate of the website, you are now analysing and monitoring the conversion rate of each goal for each traffic source.

Congratulations. You are now looking at the conversion rate data in much better way than majority of marketers out there. But unfortunately this is still sub-optimal way of analyzing conversion rate at least for an analytics ninja.

Analyze & Report Conversion Rate of each Traffic Source for each Goal in each target market

“In order to truly analyse and report conversion rate, you need to focus on the conversion rate of each goal for each traffic source and for each target market.”

Many of us run marketing campaigns on national and international level. So it becomes very important for us to know how each main geo location (it can be city, state or country) is performing in terms of improving the business bottomline.

So the questions here to ask can be:

What is the conversion rate of my goal named ‘Visit to partner with us page’ for organic traffic in the New York City and is there any improvement in this conversion rate in the last one month?

This can be an important question to ask if your business serve people only from the New York City.

Consequently you won’t be interested in knowing what people from other parts of the country are doing on your website as they are not your target market.

In order to calculate the goal conversion rate of each goal for each traffic source in your target market (like New York City), you need to create and apply an advanced segment (named ‘Traffic from New York City’) which includes only the traffic from New York City.

Then only you can get the true picture of your website performance.

If your target market is only New York city then you should be optimizing your campaigns on the basis of ‘New York City Conversion Rate’  because this is all what that really matters for your business.

If you run marketing campaigns on an international level then you need to determine the conversion rate of each goal for each traffic source and in each top revenue generating country.

You can segment conversion rate further like segmenting conversion rate for new and returning users. There is virtually no limit to which you can segment the conversion rate metric.

The important point to remember here is, to segment the conversion rate metric and not take business and marketing decisions based on overall website conversion rate.

Other Posts you may find useful:

• 8 Super Awesome Google Analytics Conversions Segments you Must use
• Attribution Modeling Case Study – Introducing Effective Click Optimization
• How to do Attribution Modeling in Google Analytics – Ultimate Guide
• What you should know about historical data in Web Analytics
• How E-Commerce Tracking works in Google Analytics – Ultimate Guide
• GAIQ Test Preparation – Tips from the Veteran + GAIQ Sample Questions
• Is your conversion Rate Statistically Significant?
• Google Analytics Shortcuts: Tricks, Tools, keyboard & APIs
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• Google Analytics Account Setup Checklist
• Event Tracking – Google Analytics (Simplified Version)