In anticipation of Google’s Universal Analytics platform sunsetting, we reached out to our experts at Conversion Logix, VP of Ad Operations Daniel Ekdahl, and our Campaign Performance Manager, Liam Keller, to give you an inside look at how our team is leveraging Google’s new analytics platform, GA4.

What industry trends set the stage for Google’s introduction of GA4? 

Danny: There are a couple of trends that have been prevalent in the industry for a long time that Universal Analytics started to address, but Google has pushed the boundaries further with GA4. 

We know internet users are switching devices from their mobile phones to their laptops and now to TVs with the adoption of smart TVs. Marketers have always found multichannel attribution to be challenging. Google is trying to help marketers with this by taking into account how a user encounters a brand across multiple devices while still maintaining privacy.

Liam: To elaborate on Danny’s point about privacy, it’s an interesting time right now in the marketing world because analytics is becoming privacy-centric, but at the same time, as an industry, we are trying to be more data-driven. We now understand cookies are eventually going away, and machine learning is being explored as a way to close that gap. 

A lot of the evolution we are seeing in Google Analytics really centers around those trends, understanding cross-device behavior and improving the way we capture data from mobile devices while giving users the anonymity and privacy they desire.

How is GA4 different from Universal Analytics?

Liam: GA4 is definitely more focused on understanding how people interact on a website. Comparatively, Universal Analytics was focused on understanding traffic volume and less granular methods of collecting user intent, like bounce rate and pages per session. In place of these types of volume metrics, GA4 provides more engagement metrics.

Danny: The biggest paradigm shift is the move from session-based to event-based analytics. Events are the star of GA4. In Universal Analytics, you had the ability to define goals (now called conversions in GA4), but in GA4, Google delineates further between events and conversions. Now advertisers are led to think about what actions are leading to other actions.

Liam: Especially when studying the purchase journeys we analyze for the multifamily housing and senior living industries, we know a user doesn’t just teleport to the end conversion [apply to lease an apartment or move a loved one to a senior living community]. There are micro-conversions that happen along the way, and Google is getting better at helping us track these smaller steps.

With these new metrics, what is your team using to evaluate campaigns?

Liam: Engagement rate and conversions are the main two metrics we look at when evaluating campaigns for clients. These action-focused metrics tell us whether prospects are engaging in ways that indicate they are interested in our clients. If these metrics are low for specific campaigns, then I would consider making changes to the campaign or moving the budget towards campaigns driving more engaged traffic.

Can you share an example of how you have used GA4’s new metrics or features to optimize campaigns?

Liam: One of the more exciting things we can do in GA4 is set up audiences (segments of users with similar website behavior) and port them into Google Ads campaigns. While audiences were available in Universal Analytics, in GA4, they’ve become more robust and easier to leverage for campaign optimization. Once added to the Google Ads platform, we can then target the users in these audiences and tailor our bidding strategy. We’ve tried this by modifying Google Ads bids based on their engagement with floor plan pages. This helped us bring high-intent users back to the client’s site, increasing conversions. 

Overall, Google is making it easier to optimize campaigns across their platforms with GA4 so advertisers can leverage tools from one platform into another, which is great news for advertisers. 

What new insights are available with GA4 that weren’t accessible with Universal Analytics?

Liam: Danny eluded earlier to the importance of understanding how users engage across multiple channels and platforms. In GA4, Google is getting better at tracking and reporting on multitouch attribution. We’ve always known how impactful top-of-the-funnel advertising campaigns like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Display, and YouTube are in driving high-converting prospects, but so much of that journey gets lost when we only focus on direct conversions. With GA4’s new multitouch reporting, we can now clearly see users taking four or five touches before converting, giving us a better reflection of how marketing actually works. It’s not a simple landscape by any means, and it’s nice to see the industry make progress toward understanding that.

What should marketers do to prepare for the sunset of Universal Analytics?

Danny: Most importantly, establish a GA4 property as soon as possible. Spend time learning how the new platform works and getting familiar with the new metrics and features to get the most out of the platform.

Google recently announced that they are now giving users a six-month window past the sunset date to extract and store Universal Analytics data. If you have a Universal Analytics account, I suggest looking into the best option for storing that data for your organization.

What can we expect from GA4 in the future?

Danny: The industry has been blaring the cookieless future siren for a while now. Google has been exploring alternatives to cookies. I’d expect more innovation from Google around privacy in the near future.

Liam: Predictive analysis is another area I see Google building upon in the years to come. While machine learning already makes up the backbone of GA4, I expect GA4’s predictive features to improve over time as the platform gathers more data. Right now, we can see cool things in GA4 like, “Google Ads was a part of 63% of user journeys for this account”. I see insights like these becoming more predictive as more data is collected. 

GA4 Resources to Keep You Ahead of the Curve 

New to GA4 and ready to learn more about it? Check out our four-part blog training series to help you get started. 

1. What is GA4? [Updated for 2023]
2. GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated for 2023]
3. GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated for 2023]
4. GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated for 2023]

Don’t miss our exclusive LinkedIn Live, Unlocking the Power of GA4: Best Practices from Google and Conversion Logix! Danny and Liam are teaming up with our agency advisors from Google to give you an inside look into the new GA4 platform.

The post Ahead of the Curve – GA4: The Next Frontier of Marketing Analytics appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The biggest difference between GA4 and Universal Analytics is the event + parameter model GA4 uses to track user engagement. Along with this new form of behavioral analytics comes a simpler and more automated way of tracking events. Google uses machine learning to determine which actions on your website to track as events and labels these within the engagement section in GA4. This means that you will now have access to more event tracking than you did in your previous analytics account and can use this information to better assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In this blog post, we’ll show you how event tracking has changed and how to set up conversions in GA4.

What are conversions in GA4?

Just like in Universal Analytics, Google gives you the ability to track specific user engagements on your website as events. These events can be labeled as conversions by users in Google Analytics. 

In the old analytics platform, the only way you could set up events was to do it yourself using Google Tag Manager or add custom scripts. Now Google continually adds events for you. This means you can have hundreds of events in your account at any given time.

Creating conversions (the new term for “goals” in Universal Analytics) is what helps users narrow down their analysis on the events that reflect important milestones in the customer journey, like a scheduled appointment or a sale.

How to Set an Event as a Conversion in GA4

GA4 gives users a new way to set up conversions directly from the analytics platform. To do this, go to the left-hand sidebar in your GA4 account and click on “All Events” under the “Events” heading and below “Conversions”.

Once you click on this page, you will see the list of events you are tracking in your account. In the example below, you will see some of the new events Google automatically creates in the platform, like page_view, scroll, and first_visit. Assigning one of these events as a conversion is as simple as toggling the switch under the “Mark as Conversion” column for an event. You can confirm if the event was set as a conversion by going to the “Conversions” page on the left-hand sidebar and checking to see if your custom event name appears there with the blue toggle turned on. 

For most users, however, Google’s default events won’t be specific enough to track the type of conversions they want to record in their account. These users will need to set up custom events in GA4. 

How to add events in GA4

With GA4, Google released a new way to create events. The new process is much easier to set up than the process in Universal Analytics. To get started, select the “Create event” button, displayed in the screenshot example above. Once you click on it, it may ask you to choose a web data stream. If you are trying to set up an event on your website, select that option.

Once you select your site, you will see the following.

Select “Create”.

Add the name of your custom event. Use underscores in place of spaces.

Select parameters that limit what gets tracked as your custom event. For example, if you want to track form submissions on a contact page and you have a thank you page with “thank you” in the title, then select “page_title” as your parameter and an operator like “contains” and type “thank you” in the value field. 

Now every time a user visits the contact form page, submits the form, and views the thank you page, an event will fire. This event can be set as a conversion, and then you can start tracking contact form submissions as conversions in your GA4 account.

What are the new limitations to event tracking?

Along with the events Google adds to your account, analytics users can add as many custom events as they want and up to 30 conversions. 

One thing to note about Google’s new autonomous event tracking, they don’t give users insight into how each custom event is set up. They give you a name for an event which can help you determine what website action drove an event. For this reason, we still set up our own custom events to ensure we are tracking the website engagement metrics that are most relevant to our clients.

Conclusion 

Google’s new analytics platform was designed with event tracking in mind. Existing users can tell this new version has come a long way in making the event and conversion tracking process easier to set up. We hope you found this article useful in setting up conversion tracking in your own GA4 account. Interesting in learning more about GA4? Watch this webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

The post GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

The launch of GA4 came with the addition of new metrics in Google’s latest analytics platform, along with the removal of some commonly used ones. Since the switch to mobile-first websites, website layouts have become increasingly centered around scrolling rather than page clicks to navigate a website. Rather than base website analytics at a session level, the new platform focuses more on tracking activity at a user level.

In GA4, Google changed the way they look at what constitutes an engaged website session and an engaged user. They decided that a session-based approach looking at page views per session, average session duration, and bounce rate didn’t do a great job of capturing how active a user is on a website.

For example, if a user lands on a website, finds the information they need quickly, and then leaves the site, that is considered a bounce and looked at as a negative experience in the current analytics platform. In the new platform, the user’s engagement with the site is measured by how often they scrolled on the page and what actions they took when they were on the site (ex: pressing buttons and filling out forms) to determine if they had a good experience. 

Here are the new metrics in GA4 and how to use them to analyze your website behavior.

New GA4 Metric: Engaged Sessions

These are sessions that last longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had two or more screen or page views.

This new metric looks beyond the occurrence of a session and reflects the quality of the session.

A session in GA4 is created when an app or webpage is opened and ends when 30 minutes of inactivity have occurred from a user.

In Universal Analytics, when the campaign source changes mid-session, it is counted as two separate sessions. GA4 counts this as one session. This provides more accurate session measurements and will result in lower session counts than what you might be used to in the previous platform. 

New GA4 Metric: Engagement Rate

Engagement rates represent “engaged sessions” divided by “total sessions”. 

This new metric gives Google Analytics users the ability to compare the quality of their website traffic by acquisition channel. This metric was created to replace bounce rate as a measure of traffic quality.

In the past, a marketing channel that had a high bounce rate was judged as being a lower-performing traffic source. This misjudged the effectiveness of marketing campaigns that led to active website traffic that happened to only view one page. This new metric will change the way marketers assess a campaign to encompass user actions that reflect active participation on a website or app.

New GA4 Metric: Engaged Sessions Per User

Engaged sessions per user reflect your engaged sessions divided by the number of users in a given time period. 

With better user tracking, Google can now help marketers tie multiple website experiences to a user. Viewed in aggregate, this can help marketers understand how effective their efforts are at bringing people back to the website.  

Other improvements in GA4 make this tracking even more valuable for analytics users that have both an app and a website. One of the new changes that GA4 brought was cross-platform tracking between apps and websites. With new cross-platform tracking analytics, users can measure engaged sessions per user across apps and websites. This helps marketers and developers analyze a more holistic user experience.

New GA4 Metric: Average Engagement Time

In place of average session duration, average engagement time measures the length of time an app was in the foreground, or a website was in focus in the browser.

Since the bar is set higher for average engagement time compared to average session duration, your stats may look lower than what you are used to.

Conclusion

GA4 offers marketers a range of new and exciting ways to track user engagement on websites. Gone are the days of relying on bounce rates to evaluate how engaged your website visitors are. Now marketers have more tools in their tool belts to assess the effectiveness of campaigns.

Interested in learning more about what’s new in GA4? Watch this webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

Read This Next: GA4 Essentials: How to Set Up Conversions in GA4 [Updated]

The post GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Google launched a new version of Google Analytics called GA4. If you’re a new user, your Google Analytics account will be created by default. If you’re an existing user, we recommend keeping your existing profile active and installing GA4 alongside your current profile.

In this blog post, we’ll explain how to upgrade your new GA4 property alongside your current Google Analytics account and walk you through the steps you need to get started in GA4. We’ll also talk through a few of the things to watch out for with this new platform.

The benefits of GA4 and what to watch out for:

• Google Analytics 4 comes with new metrics and cross-platform data collection and pulls in more event data than ever before. In order to make use of this new data, you will want to collect it for a while so your team can analyze trends over time. Google Analytics doesn’t report data retroactively, so starting the process with GA4 will enable you to collect historical data that you can use when you make the switch.
• The switch to GA4 means you will lose metrics that have long been regarded as website performance KPIs, like bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration. In place of these, Google has added new metrics that more accurately report website engagement. It’s a good idea for your team to spend time learning the new KPIs GA4 relies on on in place of these to develop new internal benchmarks.
• GA4 uses a new event tracking and event reporting system, which means you will need to recreate the goals you have set up in Universal Analytics as conversions in the new platform. For some teams, this can be a time-consuming process, and skipping this step could mean losing access to the conversion data key decision-makers rely on.

Getting started with GA4

Before we show you how to set up GA4 in tandem with your existing universal analytics account, let’s go through a brief overview of how the account structure has changed from Universal Analytics to GA4.

In Universal Analytics, an account could contain multiple properties (these properties included a unique website or mobile application) and within a property were views. One website could have more than one view, which is another way of saying configuration (settings) in the platform. In place of this structure, GA4 has accounts, properties, and data streams. Properties within an account can now include both website data and mobile app data, unlike the past system, which required you to separate these into two properties. Data streams are what differentiate the data sources you collect data from in your property.

How to create a GA4 property from your existing Universal Analytics account:

Log into your existing Google Analytics account.

Select “Admin” on the bottom left.

Check the top left under “Account” and the “Create Account” button to make sure you’ve selected the right account.

Go to the middle column labeled “Property”. If you have more than one, select the one you want to create an upgraded GA4 property for. Click “GA Set Up Assistant” right below.

Click the “Get started” button below “I want to create a new Google Analytics 4 property”.

Enable data collection of your existing tags by checking the box at the bottom of the prompt. If you have any customized tags, those will have to be recreated once you are in the account. By enabling this option, you are allowing Google to alter the tracking code on your existing website so that you pull website data into GA4 without having to edit or reinstall your tracking code. This will also allow Google to pull in event tracking from your Universal Analytics account.

Next, click the “Create Property” button.

Once you create your property, you should see the following screen. This means your new GA4 property has been set up in tandem with your Universal Analytics account. If you click the button “See your GA4 property” you will be taken to the new GA4 interface. You will know you are in GA4 if you see 14 icons on the far left sidebar and an option to look at “Data Streams”, a new feature in GA4.

Conclusion

Once you set up your GA4 property, you’re ready to start tracking new metrics and events. After 24 hours, your event data will begin to appear on the platform. In the meantime, you can learn more about the new metrics you’ll see in the platform by watching this webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

Read This Next: GA4 Essentials: Interpreting New Metrics in GA4 [Updated]

The post GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

Google launched a new Google Analytics platform called GA4. GA4, otherwise known as Google Analytics 4, is now the default Google Analytics platform when you set up a new Google Analytics account. The new platform came with a lot of changes. New metrics have been added, familiar metrics have been removed, and the overall navigation of the platform has evolved. Users of the current analytics platform may find the experience a bit jarring as they enter the new interface. Here’s what’s new in GA4.

GA4 Event Tracking 

Event tracking is at the core of GA4’s new platform. Now Google uses machine learning to autonomously set up events that indicate user engagement on your website. In the current Google Analytics platform, events have to be created by an individual using Google tag manager or custom scripts. While GA4 still gives users the ability to add their own custom events, the events added by Google are used to determine engagement on the website, which bleeds into other new metrics in the platform.

The following events are used to report engagement in the new platform: active on the website for at least 10 seconds (set up by GA4), fires a conversion (conversions are set by the user), or fires two or more screen or page view events (set up by GA4).

New Google Ads Features Linked in GA4

One new feature that GA4 offers that the previous analytics platform didn’t is the ability to easily link ad accounts from the Analytics platform rather than in the ad account. Once Google Ads is linked to your new GA4 account, you will notice a few new improvements to the integration. 

New GA4 User Metrics 

Along with an overhaul of sessions, page views, and event tracking, Google launched a few new metrics that are critical to understand if you plan to use GA4. The three most important are user engagement, engagement time, and engaged sessions per user.

Multi-touch Attribution & Cross-Device Improvements

Google launched multi-touch attribution and cross-device tracking years ago, but they’ve made several improvements to the tracking. They improved user tracking and machine learning to fill in the gaps. This makes this data more accessible to accounts that typically don’t have enough data to report these insights.

Better Insights & Predictive Analytics

GA4, like its predecessor, has predictive analytics and recommendations in the platform. The recommendations are more common on pages outside of the platform home page, unlike the previous platform. Analysis of your data with tips for improving your website shows up on the right side of the screen across more pages. The recommendations have become more sophisticated as well.

New Google Analytics Reporting Tools

The new platform comes with templates that allow users to create custom reports they can come back to, like conversion funnels, user journey mapping, cohort analysis, and more. While some of this exists in the current platform, new templates have been added to go along with the new tracking capabilities. The templates are more user-friendly than before as well.

Conclusion

So what do you think about the new changes to Google Analytics? Are you ready to try out the new platform? If you are interested in getting started with GA4 but don’t know where to begin, watch the Marketing Academy: Applying Your Analytics webinar recording with Google rep Nick Danford and the Conversion Logix team.

Read This Next: GA4 Essentials: What You Need to Know About GA4 [Updated]

The post What is GA4? [Updated] appeared first on Conversion Logix.

In the first part of this two-part series, we showed you how to track the path that website visitors take when they visit your site in Google Analytics. In part two, we will show you how to track the path prospects take before taking lead generating actions on your website. We will explore the “Conversions” section in Google Analytics, cover the most relevant reports for understanding your lead flow, and help you interpret your results.

Goals in Google Analytics

The best place to start analyzing your lead data is the “Goals” section under “Conversions” in Google Analytics. This is where you will find the number of leads generated from your site, where they converted, and what marketing channels brought in the leads. The first report you want to open in this section is the “Overview” report.

In this report, you will find the total number of Goal Completions that occurred in a given time period, an overall Goal conversion rate and a breakdown of Goal completions by Goal type. Most communities set up Goals for actions like phone calls, contact form submissions and apply now button clicks. In the example below we track additional Goal Completions from actions taken on our two Conversion Cloud products, Schedule Genie and Concession Manager.

To isolate a given Goal type as you analyze these reports, select your Goal Option in the upper left hand side.

To get the most out of your analysis, you’ll want to select the Goal types that are the most linked with lead generating actions. While at first glance it may appear that Apply Now and Application Complete are the closest actions to a lease, but these two Goals aren’t often good indicators of leads or leases on apartment websites. Apply now is often an overinflated metric and Application Complete is often underinflated. Many applications are filled out onsite and apply now clicks represent people looking for information about the application process that aren’t really interested in submitting an application. If you have a tour scheduler on your website, looking at leads who booked tours will likely be the best conversion for you to perform an analysis on. In the example above, we selected the Create Lead Goal from Schedule Genie, which is a step in the tour scheduling process where the prospect submits their contact information for their tour.

Below the breakdown of Goals Completions by type is a list view with the top marketing sources and mediums that Google attributes to your Goal Completions. If you limit your view of the Overview page to a single Goal type, the data in this part of the report will be limited to the source data relevant for that Goal type.

By default, Google uses the Last Non-Direct Click attribution model when measuring and reporting on Goal Completions. This means that the last marketing channel that a lead comes in from (not including direct sources) will get all the credit for a conversion in this report.

Direct traffic sources appear when Google can’t attribute the true traffic source or if the only source present is a direct entrance to the website.

If you want to explore other attribution models outside of the default Last Non-Direct Click model, go to the “Model Comparison Tool” under “Attribution” in the “Conversions” section. There you can compare how many conversions are attributed to a given source if you use a different attribution mode. Some examples of these include the First Interaction Model, Position-Based Model or Time Decay, among others. To learn more about what these different attribution models do check out this resource from Google.

You can toggle between Source/Medium and Goal Completion Location within the list view. If you select Goal Completion Location, Google will show you the pages where the goal completions took place.

For a more in-depth report, visit the Goal URLs page.

To get an idea of the pages that leads came in from before converting on a given webpage, check out the Reverse Goal Path report.

How long does the typical prospect take to become a lead?

Within the Conversions section in Analytics, under “Multi-Channel Funnels” is a report called “Time Lag” where you can find out how many days took place between the first interaction users had on your website and the day they made a conversion.

In this example we looked at the time it took for leads that scheduled a tour in the month of May to convert. Most conversions occurred within the day of the first visit, but three leads came back to the site 2-4 weeks later to schedule a tour, and one tour was scheduled two to three months after the lead first visited the website. This just goes to show how varied the apartment search process between individuals can be and why communities should evaluate their marketing performance using longer attribution windows.

Within this report, and others in the Conversions section in Analytics, Google lets you select a lookback window. This is the period of time that Google tracks user activity before a conversion.

By default, Google selects 30 days. While many online conversions occur within a day or two of a website visit, there are still prospects who spend months in the searching phase and come back to a community website over a longer span of time before they convert, which is why you’ll want to select a 90 day look back window (the longest period Google lets you select).

You can drill down on the Time Lag report by paid, organic, and direct traffic sources to compare the length of time it takes for paid and organic traffic to convert. You might want to select a longer attribution window when making these comparisons in order to get enough data.

To make time lag comparisons between marketing sources, click on “Conversion Segments” in the upper left hand corner of the report and select between the comparison options available.

How many website visits does a typical website visitor make before they convert?

You can find this in the “Path Length” report under “Multi-Channel Funnels”. This report shows you how many times a prospect came to your website before becoming a lead. Most conversions take place within a single website session but come back and forth to the site before making the decision to connect with the community.

How many marketing channels contribute to a conversion?

To get a better idea of how different marketing channels work together to convert a website visitor into a lead you can look at the “Top Conversion Paths” report.

This report shows you how many leads convert through paths that involved multiple marketing sources and in which order they engaged with your marketing campaigns before becoming a lead. Within indirect paths, it isn’t uncommon to see a combination of paid and organic journeys where website visitors come in to a website initially from an ad and then later through an organic or direct search.

It’s important to note that if a prospect sees an ad, email or social media post and doesn’t click into your website, then comes back later through another marketing channel, the original marketing efforts won’t be tracked by Google Analytics. When these prospects come back to your website later through another source, that source will be given the credit for the conversion. This traffic is often lumped in with organic and direct sources.

Since Google often attributes unknown traffic sources as direct traffic you might want to filter this source out when you analyze this report. You can do this by selecting the “advanced” and setting up a filter.

Select “Exclude” and then type in “Direct” and click “Apply” to filter out this traffic.

This will help you narrow in on more interesting conversion paths and give you better intelligence to make optimization insights with.

How to Apply This Data

So far we’ve learned where to go to see the number of conversion that took place on your site, the types of conversions that occurred, the pages they occured on, what marketing channels contributed to the conversion process and how many days it took a prospect to take a converting action.

Here’s how these new tools can help you assess and improve your marketing efforts.

By comparing the types of Goals that get the most engagement you can gain insight into where your leads are in the leasing process and how many leads you have coming down the pipeline. If they call you or fill out a contact form, they are likely interested in seeking out more information about your community. If they schedule a tour or redeem an offer on your website, they are showing a greater interest in coming in person or moving further down the leasing funnel.

Your marketing source data and your top conversion paths give you an idea of the types of marketing efforts that are effective at moving leads through the funnel. The marketing channels that played the greatest role in generating traffic that converts are the ones you want to optimize for or make greater investments in when you need to generate more leads. When you make modifications to your campaigns, you can track the success of your changes by how many conversions these marketing channels helped generate. By looking at a holistic view of your conversion paths you give more credit to marketing channels that often get left out of the attribution picture.

The post Uncovering Your Prospects’ Website Journey: Part 2 Lead Flow appeared first on Conversion Logix.

In a world full of multiple online and offline touchpoints, it’s become increasingly important for communities to understand the journey their prospects engage in before they become a lead.

Where do potential renters go to find trustworthy sources of information about your community? Which marketing touchpoints do they engage with first? Are the channels prospects go through to find your community online and in person working for or against you? Amidst this growth in complexity, marketing channels and platforms are making a greater effort to give companies more transparency and better tools to answer these questions.

One of the channels communities have the most control over in the customer journey is their website. Most communities already have the tools they need to understand how prospects are interacting with it but don’t know how to use them.

In this two-part series, we’ll help you retrace your prospects’ digital footprints so you can find out which pages on your website lead to engagement, and which lead to abandonment. In part one, we’ll show you the pages website visitors are visiting as they navigate through your website. In part two, we’ll explore the website journey that highly interested prospects took before they became a lead.

Are you ready to start your investigation?

Step 1: Log into your Google Analytics account.

Yes. that scary place with all the numbers, charts and arrows. Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you make it out of there alive.

Step 2: Enter the “Behavior Flow” page.

On the left-hand side of your account sits a menu. To navigate to the “Behavior Flow” page you’ll need to first click on the “Behavior” tab.

Once you click on this tab the drop down menu will appear underneath it. Click on the tab labeled, “Behavior Flow”.

Step 3: Select your time range.

In the upper right-hand side of this page, you have the option to select the time frame you want to view the data from. We recommend looking at at least a month’s worth of data to get a better sample. A year’s worth is more ideal.

Navigating Through Your Behavior Flow Results

Now you should have an overview of your website traffic flow. In the first column, you can see the landing pages that your website visitors are entering into your site from. In most cases, your homepage will be the landing page you get the most traffic from (your homepage will be delineated by “ / “ or “/index”).

In the second column, you will see the starting page in your website visitor’s journey, if people leave the website from this page, they will be counted as a drop-off. The drop-offs are visually represented in red. If you hover over the red flows you will see the total number of people who dropped off after visiting a given page.

The grey flows show you where the traffic moved from one page to the next. The size of the flow represents the relative amount of traffic that passed through that customer journey. On most apartment websites the largest flow will be from the homepage (and other variations of it like the index page”) to the floorplans page. In this example, the floor plans page was the second page most website visitors visited after viewing the homepage. After this page, most people went back to the homepage.

Tracking Customer Journeys by Source & Campaign

One of the more interesting features that behavior flows offer is the ability to segment website journeys by marketing source or drill down to the marketing campaign or ad level. If you change the segmenting options within the first left-hand column in white, you can navigate between these filters.

Source

If you want to evaluate the flow of your traffic by the source of your marketing traffic, you can do so by selecting “Source” from the green drop-down menu on the upper left-hand side.

Once you select this view you will see a page that looks like the one below. At this level, you can evaluate whether some traffic sources lead to more drop-offs or whether if a marketing source is bringing in the website visitors who navigate through a series of pages on your site.

Campaign

If your community is running any specific marketing campaigns, such as Paid Search, Display, Social, or Email, you should use the campaign view to segment your traffic flow. All you have to do to navigate here is search or select “campaign” (it lives under the “Advertising” heading) in the same drop down menu you used to segment by source.

To get the most out of segmenting options like these, you can opt to highlight flows of traffic that come from different campaigns. If you select on the white campaign boxes on the left-hand side, an option appears to highlight website traffic from a campaign.

Once you take this step you’ll see a highlighted flow chart like the one below. This will help you isolate the traffic flow and drop off rates specific to a given campaign and compare them to your other marketing efforts.  

To return to the overview level, select the white campaign box and click on “clear highlighting”.

Interpreting Your Behavior Flow Results

High Drop Off Rates

If you’re noticing a high drop off rate on a particular page that could be an indication that your page isn’t effective or that your traffic isn’t as qualified. If you’re experiencing heavy drop-offs on your floorplans page that could be an indication that your pricing, types of units, and availability aren’t in alignment with your website traffic. If you believe traffic quality is the issue, dig deeper and uncover which campaigns have higher drop-off rates. Use this information to improve your targeting efforts. If your traffic is qualified but is still leaving your site at a high rate, it could be due to slow load times, bad website layouts or a lack of relevant information.

In the case of a one-page website, or with pages that contain the majority of the website’s information, a prospect doesn’t have a reason to navigate to another page, so communities will see a high drop off rate there.

Optimize Critical Pages

The most visited pages on your website are the most valuable pages on your website. If your average prospect only visits the homepage, floorplans page, and the gallery page, you know that those pages are critical to selling your community online. If you know which pages are the most important to your marketing efforts, you can prioritize optimizing those particular pages to get the most ROI from your site. In the examples stated above, it would make sense for that community to try incorporating gallery images of specific floorplans within the floorplan page so that prospect can find the information they are looking for right away. Communities should also ensure that call to actions are visible and relevant on critical pages so your community can maximize conversions in the places that are most likely to see the most traffic.

Conclusion

The first step to creating an exceptional customer journey is to understand the current one. We hope you walked away from this article with the skills you need to start tracking a critical component in your community’s online journey. Stay tuned for part 2, where we break down the path that led your most interested website visitors took before they converted into a lead.

The post Uncovering Your Prospects’ Website Journey: Part 1 appeared first on Conversion Logix.