Web Site Measurement Hacks

Measure Conversion Through Multiple Goals

A particularly advanced use of your web measurement application is tracking visitors as they convert on multiple goals through your site. While easy to say, it can be much harder to do successfully unless you’re careful in how you set up your conversion tracking.

Web sites have at least a primary goal: retail web sites sell products, financial services sites take applications for financial services, and travel sites allow the purchase and reservation of travel services. However, most sites have other primary or secondary goals. For instance, a site may enable its users to sign up for a newsletter, submit a customer service request, change a travel reservation, check an account balance, sign up for a loyalty program, request a government service, participate in a survey, sign up for a sweepstakes, download software, or read content that your company has published. In web measurement, each of these goals, when accomplished by a visitor to your site, is generally referred to as a value event.

How to Measure Conversion Through Multiple Goals

There are a number of important steps you must take to calculate conversion rates for the multiple goals of your site.

Understand the capabilities of your web measurement application.

Some web analytics products and services require that all value events be designated in advance by physically placing a page tag on the page that indicates that such a value event has occurred. Others are able to identify certain ...