Create Sales Funnels Strong Enough to Support THREE Bears!

You should be able to answer YES to that because you have setup goals, funnels and conversion tracking. You are quantifing it with the sales, leads, sign-ups or other goals you are tracking. Looks great, you are making money or have the leads & sign-ups that you will convert into cash in the bank. But, (yes another but!) is that really the most sales, leads, signups or whatever your site could be generating?

The goals, funnels and conversion tracking that you have setup only tell you part of the story. There is something that occurs to get visitors from one page to another – a click. Those clicks fall on your site’s ability to get visitors to perform the next action and that duty is left up to your Call to Action buttons or engagment elements.

Here is how you can track those to help you setup testing to maximize the number of sales, leads, etc. that your site can produce for you.

In Google Analytics (GA) there is a feature called Event Tracking. Originally designed to help track interaction with Flash, event tracking has become highly useful in tracking other events or actions on websites that are outside the normal reporting features of GA.

Now, this isn’t something that requires any setup in Google Analytics but requires you to add a tiny code snippet to your website that sends the data to GA for you to later analyze.

Here is that piece of code:
pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value)

The category, action, optional_label, optional_value are all pieces of the code you will change to uniquely identify your calls to action. Here is the scheme that I have found useful:

• Category – Name this the after the page that the call to action you are tracking resides ie. Homepage, XYZ-Product-Page, Campaign-Landing-Page, etc.
• Action – This is a descriptor, I usually have “click” assigned to this because I am tracking clicks on the call to actions
• Optional_Label - This is where you will uniquely name each of your calls to action so you can test out different engagement elements for the pages ie. Red-Button, Themed-Button, etc.
• Optional_Value - This isn’t important to this tracking so this can be left blank.

Here is a filled in example:
pageTracker._trackEvent('dallas-weddings', 'click', 'left-hand-red')

Now for the implementation on you page.

Since we are tracking clicks on calls to action we want this event to occur when the click occurs so it needs to be placed within an anchor tag. Keep in mind that Google Analytics runs on Javascript so you will be using the onClick command to pass this to GA. Here is what it will look like fully implemented:

Now, with that piece of code in place you will begin to accrue data on the clicks. Here is where to find the reporting in the GA console:

Based on these reports you can make the best decision on what works for your website. Select the best calls to action that captures visitor attention and reduces attrition from your funnels. This will produce higher conversion numbers and help better understand the full potential your site has.

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