Regardless of what kind of online business you have, you must keep track of what visitors are doing while at your site and if they're following the process that you want them to follow.

One great example of this is a squeeze page. This is a page that you set up in order to allow people to sign up to your email list. Oftentimes you'll give them something for free just for joining.

But how do you know how many of your site visitors are actually following through and signing up to your newsletter list? Sure, you can take a look at how many subscribers you have; but how many people does it take on average before someone does opt-in to your newsletter? In other words, what is your newsletters conversion rate?

One very quick and easy way to find this out for yourself is to use Google's Analytics program. This program allows you to set up goals for your website so that you'll know what percentage of site visitors are taking the action you want them to take.

Here's how:

First, set your website up with Google Analytics. This is very easy to do and it's completely free. You can find this site by entering "Google Analytics" into Google. You will not need to register for an account if you already have a Gmail account. Just use your Gmail user name and password to log in. Once you're there, click the link that says "Add Website Profile"; This is typically located at the bottom of the page.

Next, during the set up process, you'll be given some code by Google to place on your web pages. This code should go on every web page within your site that you wish to track.

Once the tracking code has been installed, you can now set up a goal to track how many people are actually performing the action that you want them to take while at your site. For this example, we'll use the opt-in page for a newsletter.

1. Set up your website. From the Google Analytics HOME page, locate the website you want to set a goal for.
2. Click the "Edit" link on the far right.
3. Next, scroll down to "Goals" and then click "Add Goal".
4. Give the goal a name. This can be whatever would help you remember what that goal is all about. For instance, "HOME Page Opt-In Confirmation".
5. Set a goal type. For this example, we're using "URL Destination" because we want to track how many people end up on our opt-in thank you page. You can also set goals for "Time on Site" or "Pages per Visit".
6. Next, set the details. The first thing you'll need to do is set your match type. For this example, we'll use "Exact Match" but there are two additional types of matches; "Head Match" and "Regular Expression Match". The latter two are explained in detail on the Google Analytics website. "Exact Match" means that we want to track when someone explicitely lands on a specific page.
7. Next, enter the URL of this page. This will usually be the page that the site visitor is taken to after they've confirmed their email address.
8. Enter a value for that site visitor. In our example here with the opt-in page, technically there is no monetary value since the site visitor is not purchasing anything. However, had this been a page that they had landed on after completing a purchase, then that purchase would have a monetary value which you could then enter into this box.
9. Finally, you can also create a funnel for this goal. A funnel is a series of steps that someone would take in order to get to your final destination page. This is a little too much information to add here but the Google Analytics site does very well explaining how to set it up.

Now that you have a goal set up for your website, you will now know how many people are opting in to your newsletter list.

If you happen to see that this is a reliably small number, say less than 1%, it would indicate that maybe your opt-in page needs a little work.

On the other hand if you see that your opt-in rate is at 5% or greater, then you know you're doing a pretty good job of getting people to sign up to your list and you can then keep tweaking this page to try and reach a higher conversion rate.

All in all, knowing how well a certain page or product on your site is working will do wonders for your bottom line and Google Analytics is one fantastic free tool that can help you find out this information.

SEO Myrtle Beach

SEO