Common Marketing & SEO Checklist SEO best practices and guidance to help your website perform online.

Why Identify Drop Off Points in Your Conversion Funnel is important for your website and SEO

Identifying pain points in your conversion funnel that cause customer abandonment is critical to maximizing your conversion rate.Don’t just measure total conversions or conversion rate – track every step of process. Use this to pinpoint the steps in your funnel that cause customers to drop off. Once you’ve isolated the problem pages, dig deeper to figure out what the problem is. Is your form too long? Do you ask for too much information? Your goal is to reduce or eliminate every pain point for your customers.

How to Identify Drop Off Points in Your Conversion Funnel.

Don’t just track total conversions or conversion rates. To set up a conversion funnel in Google Analytics, first create a goal:

• Open Analytics and click “Admin” in the top navigation. It’s next to the Customization tab.
• Choose the Property then the View that you want to track and then click “Goals”
• There are many types of goals to choose from, including duration based goals and goals triggered by events. For this example, click “New Goal” and enter a goal name and goal destination URL (for example, the /thank-you page that users see after signing up for an account). You can edit existing goals here by clicking the name of the goal.
• Click on “Goals Details”
• Assign a monetary value to your goal if you know how much the goal is worth, even if you’re not measuring purchases (currency can be updated in the View Settings). This will allow Analytics to calculate value for channel, landing page and visitor.

Now, set up your funnel:

• Turn on the Funnel.
• Enter the URLs of the pages people visit to go through the conversion process. This will be different for every website. If you don’t have a predetermined path, go to the Reverse Goal Path report under Conversions to see the three pages visited for each goal conversion.
• Click “Verify this Goal” to see how often the Goal would have converted based on your data from the past 7 days – if this reads 0% check that there are no errors.
• Give the funnel a chance to gather data, then head over to the Reporting tab and click “Conversions” from the bottom of the left menu, then “Goals”, and finally “Funnel Visualization”.
• Choose the goal you want to analyze and set the date range. Now you can see which steps in your conversion funnel cause users to drop off, with details of the pages they divert to (or simply where they exit), along with how many users make it through the funnel to convert.

Some useful resources and external links for tips regarding SEO & Marketing Strategies

• Page-Analytics Chrome extension (Heat mapping code)