Websites are customer facing initiatives and thus their main goal is to have higher visitor participation or even conversion (an intended user activity like sales). Website owners can use statistical numbers of site visitor analysis to track such goals as viewing a particular webpage, downloading a specific file, lead generation (contact form details completed) and sales effected.

Alternatively if only 1% of your mailing list signups lead to a successful sale, you should only assign $5 to the 'email sign-up' goal. Google analytics offers a user friendly view in the form of a dashboard where statistics can be obtained by assigned time whether day or month. Hence website owners can easily measure which web initiative of theirs is working and even un-cover some new (unexpected) sources of quality visitors. Goal conversions are thus a marketers’ primary measure for assessing how well the website is fulfilling the business objectives. You can easily use the graphical report of Google analytics to analyse conversion trends for specific goals or even for the overall conversions / conversion value.

By measuring goal conversion and changing the setting of your Adwords campaign you will find that different keywords attract a different profile of customer. The most notable example of this is in the accommodation industry where certain Internet users type in the word “cheap” whilst other use terms such as “luxury”.

Reducing website abandonment rate

When people come to your website and leave a particular web page without completing the activity that defines that web page goal, it is termed as 'abandonment'. There are various reasons for this abandonment and it affects all websites.

For example you may invest heavily in sophisticated design effects, but they could have unfriendly written content with a poor merchandising approach, this will increase the abandonment rate of the shopping cart webpage as visitors find it problematic.

Below are some useful tips to reduce website abandonment:

1. Site-Security –always build trust with your target visitors by putting customer endorsements, third party (partner) logos, valid contact details (physical address, telephone numbers and e-mail ID) and have a secure server address (https).

2. Shorten visitor interaction process: have only the necessary steps as part of the process with such innovations as pre-filled forms for returning visitors. Help customers save time so that can interact more in less time.

3. Inform customers about process completion status: Using a friendly status bar is good way of helping visitors manage their time and motivate them to quickly complete the process too.

4. Remove distractions: feedback forms, site registration or even promotional advertisements should be used only when necessary and only after the visitor has completed the payment process.

5. Use user friendly norms: Make it easy for visitors to understand your web page by using standardised ways of interacting with them (language, icons etc).

Improving Google Adwords ROI

Different marketing initiatives like PPC advertisements, search engine referrals, e-mail campaigns and also offline promotions have different impact on your website goal achievements. With custom Google Analytics reports, you can easily find out which marketing campaign is delivering the most valuable traffic to your website and also tell how visitors navigate on web-pages.

Adwords campaigns are popular key words/phrases that you can purchase and use for your marketing campaigns and by tracking their performance you can determine what is working and what is not. The five reports that help you track your Google Ad words ROI are:

- Visitors –number of visits from different segments of visitors, details of their website activity (time spent) and also loyalty (number of recent visits).
- Traffic Sources- quantity and quality of visitors you get from various sources – ie: search engines, web-directories, referrals, PPC, keywords, and other promotional campaigns.
- Content – popularity rankings of different content sections and visitor navigation across different webpage layouts. - Funnel Visualisation - shows you how visitors progress through or abandon the conversion steps to different web page goals on your site. This helps you to rectify your 'funnel web-pages' if they are difficult to navigate as they show a high visitor drop-off rate and low conversion percentages.
- Ecommerce - shows conversion rate, revenue (value of different purchases), transaction details (purchase order numbers) and average order value/revenue from each purchase. Regular analysis of these custom reports enables you to accurately pinpoint flaws in your website and subsequently improve their goal conversion rates. You can achieve this by focusing on those web pages which have the worst performance and using industry best practices (ideally from a seasoned expert/vendor like ROI.com.au) for higher funneling of web visitors towards your webpage goals.