How To use Google Analytics in Sales Funnel

For metrics, the most important thing to set up is Google Analytics and ‘Goal Tracking’. Goal tracking allows you to look at precisely who is making it to your checkout page and your ‘thank you for buying page’ using cookies.

You can then see how those visitors behaved prior to buying and you can see which searches led to that action etc. This is invaluable data to use for fine tuning your funnel, which we’ll be looking at in the next chapter.

Lead Management

Another thing to consider is how you will manage your leads. This is going to mean creating a mailing list for most people and then using an autoresponder in order to manage those emails.

Your autoresponder is basically the tool that you’ll use to collect your emails (via a form you’ll build to put on your site) as well as to send them out. You can then log in to the autoresponder and create your emails, before clicking to deliver them to everyone on that list.

Auto responders also perform a range of other jobs, for example they will let you manage unsubscribes and create a ‘double opt-in’ process, meaning that users need to confirm their email addresses (thereby avoiding people signing up with fake emails and helping you to ensure all your subscribers really are going to read your messages).

Perhaps one of the most powerful features of many autoresponders though is the option to see how engaged your various readers are. You’ll be able to see for example how many people are opening each email and which of your users really aren’t engaging at all.

More usefully, you’ll be able to identify the people who always open emails and who always click on the links. These are your more engaged users and your more qualified leads. In other words?

They’re the ones who are ready to move on to the next stage in your funnel and you can set up your autoresponder to email them only once they reach this certain point.

Lead Scoring

We’ve mentioned leads a few times in this post so far. Of course a lead is anyone who you can potentially sell too but they will vary in terms of how useful they are and how likely they are to be willing to buy.

A cold lead is someone who has never heard of you before. This is the person who has just landed on your site or who is seeing an ad from you for the first time. A warm lead is someone who has shown some kind of interest by subscribing, liking you on social media etc. Your qualified lead is someone who has shown interest in a product by getting a quote or by spending time in your store. This is the person who is the easiest to now convert into a customer. Well here is a secret I can't hide my darling digital bestie, want to know the bizz that has turned me into a six figure earner please click here for a sneak peek

Your job of course is to take your visitors from cold leads all the way to qualified leads. And one way to make this easier is by lead scoring – calculating just how warm each lead is and how far away they are from being qualified.

The best autoresponder software will do this for you and make it much easier to message the right people at the right time – because timing is everything when it comes to sales!

Increasing Conversion Rates

Once your sales funnel is set up and live, all that’s left to do is to watch as the sales come in and then tweak it to try and generate more revenue and more profit.

The best way to do this is to increase your conversion rates at each stage of the funnel.

How do you make sure that more people go from visiting your site to signing up for your mailing list?

And how do you encourage them to go from buying your cheapest item, to buying your most expensive item?

Investment

One simple answer is to invest. We discussed this already when we talked about adding polish – but it’s something you can continue to do with time.

As money starts to come in from your sales, invest that back into your funnel by improving each step of the process. That means making your products better by adding more sheen and more freebies, it means making your videos better, it means investing in more marketing (see below) and it means building a better brand with the right logo and the right web design.

Hire writers, hire web designers and generally keep growing and improving your business. Your job is not ‘done’ once it goes live!

Advertising

One of the easiest ways to increase your conversion rates is to improve your targeting.

And one of the best ways to get more targeted visitors to your sites, other than using your established ‘routes to market’, is to use PPC to create targeted adverts.

The other way to target your audience is through PPC. PPC is ‘Pay Per Click’ advertising and is most associated with either Google AdWords or Facebook Ads.

Both types of advertising allow very precise targeting for your campaigns so that you can ensure your ads are being seen by the right people. For example, on Facebook, you can choose adverts that are only seen by people with certain hobbies listed, people in certain locations or people with certain jobs.

Likewise, on Google AdWords, you can target people based on the searches they perform. Adverts on Google AdWords appear on the SERPs – Search Engine Results Pages.

This means that you can place your ads for watches on the search ‘Buy Watches Online’. It’s safe to assume that people searching that term will have an interest in buying watches!

Watching Metrics

Also very important is to look at your reports and metrics. Track which adverts are bringing customers to your site, look at which products are selling best, and even look at what times of day are the most active for you.

Most importantly – look at where your best customers are coming from. This is important because you can then invest more time and more money into what is working and start to move away from what isn’t working.

This is where Google Analytics and Goal Tracking come in particularly useful.

Another way you can do this is by using split testing. Split testing means creating two versions of a web page (such as your squeeze page) and then introducing subtle differences to each version.

You then see which of your two versions performs best and therefore decide whether to keep or abandon those changes. There are tools that let you do this, such as Optimizely