Your conversion rate is wrong, here’s how you get it right.
I’m going to assume that you are tracking visitors to your website. If you have done it right you also track whether they convert or not according to your business goals.
But, are you getting the correct data from it? — Not likely.
Why is my conversion rate wrong?
Most of the GA Properties I’ve analyzed measure conversion by:
Goal Completions / Total visits
straight off the bat.
The fundamental error here is that we include visitors who aren’t eligible to convert at all.
For example:– You have a login link to your software on the homepage that existing customers use.
– You have a multilingual website, and use the same tracking code for each of them.
– You only do business with specific geographical regions.
It’s simple, you can’t choose who visits your website. But you can make sure that you don’t let them skew your conversion rate data.
How do I start tracking my true conversion rate?
If you use Google Analytics (and you probably are) you do it by creating segments! With these you will be able to get your true target group, and with that your true conversion rate.
To eliminate more advanced problems like existing customers, students or similar visiting your site, you will need to add a few more parameters to the segments you create, but the process is still the same.
- Head over to the admin tab and go to “Segments” in the view you are using.
- Go to “Create new segment” and fill in the criterias you need. In this example I’ve decided to include all swedish speaking visitors located in Sweden, Norway or Denmark.
- After you’ve fine-tuned your true target group, go back to “reporting” click on “+ Add Segment” and add the segment you created
Now you will be able to view the metrics of your true target group, and start optimizing your channels and your site for the visitor that really matter to your business.
The next step? Breaking out the true conversion rates by channel, device, browser, screen size, demographics, buyer personas and more. The list becomes quite extensive when you want to come closer to “perfect tracking”.
