Why a key event?
For most sites on the internet, the end result is to create a lead. In website terms, leads come from site visitors contacting you, or signing up to join your mailing list (or downloading an ebook etc).
Leads become an effective mechanism to be used for future marketing efforts, such as creating a newsletter or reaching out to leads on an individual basis. Knowing the performance of our lead capture methods over time is critically important, just as important as knowing what percentage of leads ultimately convert to sales.
Google Analytics is an immensely powerful tool for traffic analysis as well as SEO activities. You really can find out a multitude of information about users, such as demographics, their device preference all the way down to their interests! If you haven’t invested several hours trawling through your Google Analytics data, I’d recommend to do so, as you’ll learn a LOT about your site visitors.
All this Analytics information is indeed useful, but what I want to focus on in this blog is the conversions area of Google Analytics, and more specifically, Key Events. This blog is focused around WordPress sites, but the Google Analytics component can just as easily be added for sites hosted on other platforms.
Key events are important for any business, so you can understand what percentage of users are effectively doing what you want them to do. This means users are effectively flowing into your sales funnel. Key events are important to measure performance of your website and it gives you the essential information to track the performance over time..
Many sites take the easy route to add contact key events and use the fact that a user clicks their “contact us” page as a key event completion. That’s not enough, however as the user needs to actually submit the contact form to successfully generate a lead. In this blog, I’ll show you how to do that.
To make a key event happen, there are two requirements:
1. Create a Thank you page (or similar) that’s displayed after a form is successfully submitted. Simply create a new WordPress page called Thank you and add a note to thank the user for submitting their information and provide additional contact information for your business. This is critical, so we can set the thank you page display as the key event completion.
2. Use a contact form that can display your Thank you page after successful submission. At Evolocity, we recommend Contact form 7 for WordPress for this purpose, as it’s highly configurable and stable contact form plugin. I won’t go into all the details of setting up the contact form in this blog, but in Contact form 7 you can use the hook on_sent_ok to display a thank you page after the form is successfully submitted.
With that in mind, let’s create the key event of a contact form submission.
Inside Google Analytics, at the bottom left of your account, click the Admin tab.
In the View column, click “Goals” to setup a new goal: Click “New Goal” and proceed to setup your Contact goal. Go to Enquiry and select the “Contact us” radio button. Give your Goal description a name and Click type “Destination”
Enter the Goal details equal to /thank-you/ (or whatever you decided to name your Thank You page)
To keep things simple, let’s ignore the optional value and funnel options and keep the default settings.
You can then verify the goal, which will check your Analytics data for the past week and inform you how many times the goal would have been activated if it were enabled. When finished, click Save and the goal is set and we are done!
You can then monitor the performance of your goal over time in Google Analytics, in Conversions -> Goals area.
Adding a contact goal in Google Analytics is easy, by adding a Thank You page which is fired from your contact form. Contact goals are important for your business, as they are the foundation for leads and lead generation which should be a priority for all businesses. For other tips on how to improve SEO for your small business, check out other blog posts here or here.
For help with your SEO, or Online Marketing contact Evolocity today or call us on 02 8091 4530.