Once you start sending people to your opt-in page, and you get some of those people to subscribe for your lead magnet, you’ll want to know how well your opt-in process is performing.
There’s a well-known saying in marketing circles:
You can’t improve what you don’t measure…
In other words, if you don’t see as many subscribers as you would like, you need to know where in the process things are going wrong so you can focus on that area in order to fix the problem.
This is where you need to implement “goal tracking”.
Fortunately, it’s a lot easier to do than you might imagine to begin with.
First, let’s clear up some terminology so we’re on the same page.
A goal is defined as a specified point in your marketing funnel. For example, becoming a new subscriber is a goal.
The performance of any given part of your marketing funnel is referred to as the conversion rate, and is expressed as a percentage. For example, if 100 people see your opt-in form, and 25 of them subscribe, the conversion rate of your opt-in form is 25%.
How Do You Measure These Metrics?
Remember, one of the first things you did at the beginning of this course was to prepare your website analytics using either Google Analytics or Clicky (or both).
This is why that step was so important.
Because you can now set up goals in those analytics tools to track the performance of your email subscriber process.
Creating Your New Subscriber Goal In Clicky
Here’s a screenshot of the goal setup page in Clicky.
The goal setup screen in Clicky
- Step 1: make sure the “Active” box is checked…
- Step 2: Enter a name for your goal…
- Step 3: The goal URL is the last part of your thank you page URL. For example, if your thank you page is “http://mywebsite.com/thank-you-new-subscriber/” then the goal URL is simply “/thank-you-new-subscriber/”
- Step 4: You can leave the advanced settings blank or as they are…
- Step 5: Click “submit”…
That’s all there is to it 🙂
Creating Your New Subscriber Goal In Google Analytics
Go to your Google Analytics dashboard for your website, and click on the “Admin” link at the bottom of the left menu (there’s a gear icon next to it).
The admin page has 3 sections.
Look in the third section on the right for “Goals”. There’s a flag icon next to it.
When you click on “goals”, the next window will show you the goals you already have (if any) and a red button to add a new goal.
At the bottom of the goal setup section, click on “custom” and then “continue”.
Give your goal a name in the description.
Choose “destination” in the “type” section.
Click “continue” to move to step 3 (goal details).
In the goal details section select “equals to” for the destination and then paste the goal URL, which is the last part of your thank you page URL. For example, if your thank you page is “http://mywebsite.com/thank-you-new-subscriber/” then the goal URL is simply “/thank-you-new-subscriber/”
You can then click “save” to add your goal to your Google Analytics.
Checking Your Goal Stats
Once you’ve set up your goals, your analytics system will start tracking them over time.
It’s a good idea to check the results regularly but not every day; once per week is more than enough.
Once you have enough data (ideally, you’ll want a sample size of at least 100 visits to your opt-in page), you’ll have a good idea of how well things are working.
From there, you can make educated decisions about what to change as you work to improve the performance of your opt-in process.