As a Digital Marketing Agency, we often use Google Analytics to track website traffic for a variety of digital advertising, search engine optimization, and social media advertising campaigns. However, we often find many businesses are not set up to track conversions, yet they are spending thousands of dollars trying to drive traffic to their site through digital marketing. This is concerning! Let’s be honest for a second, your revenue goals and advertising success metrics are only going to be achieved if measured appropriately through Google Analytics.
We have gotten this far and I assume your question is, how do we do this? I’m happy you asked, here is how…
Setting Up a Goal
In the Admin panel in Google Analytics under VIEW you will see a goals option. Now you can see what goals are setup. Today, we are going to provide you with direction on how to setup a form submission goal.
Start by locating the form on your contact us page and send a test message to yourself. When the message went through did you see a thank you page and a URL that looks like this: www.yourdomain.com/thankyou/? If so, this is going to be easy. If not, then your goal setup will probably require Google Tag Manager or custom coding. Use the Tag Manager, please…
Google Analytics Goal Setup
Click +NEW GOAL button, then select Custom at the bottom. Name your new goal: Form Submissions and select Destination. See the example to the right ex:thanks.html. Select Continue.
Now you should be on the Goal details page and you’ll see destination equals to drop down. Change it to begin with: /thankyou/. Then you might want to verify the goal. Usually, if a form fill has been submitted within the last 7 days the verify goal will pick it and it will provide you a conversion 0%. If you know you’ve had some form submissions, but it still shows 0%. Submit a form and wait until the next day to check. If it doesn’t register, there is an error.
You can add a value to your goal, but this is not required. I recommend doing some quick math and setting a value. You can always change it in the future, now that you’re measuring conversions. Finally, you can save your goal and you’re done.
Acquisition Source/Medium Section
Keep an eye on your goal, use the acquisition sources/medium section to see how organic traffic converts versus paid traffic. How display advertising traffic converts versus social media advertising, and more.
If we couldn’t help solve your form submission challenge in this post, we will create a post using a Google Tag Manager setup. Last of all, if we ever get a chance to work together; Actuate Media will also help log your website, organic, and paid media phone calls into Google Analytics. We can measure just about everything, even the views on your fancy YouTube video.
