How to find your conversion rate in Google Analytics

How do you know how well your sales page or landing page is performing? If you haven’t heard of the term conversion rate, it’s the percentage of visitors that complete a certain action. That action could be to buy your offer from your sales page, or sign up for your opt-in freebie.

You can track your conversion rate in Google Analytics. You set up a goal, and see where visitors came from and which pages/posts get you the most subscribers or sales.

Want to know the structure of a high-converting sales page? Get my free Sales Page Blueprint:

Keep in mind that if you get very few subscribers or sales, the problem isn’t always with the actual page. You might need to get more traffic to the page.

If you haven’t already, set up Google Analytics for your site first and make sure to redirect new subscribers to a Thank You page.

Setting up goals to track your conversion rate in Google Analytics

1. Go to the Admin area of Google Analytics. From the ACCOUNT and PROPERTY columns, select the property you’re working with. In the VIEW column, click Goals.

2. Click the button to create a new goal. Give it a name that makes sense to you and select the type of goal you want. For a conversion goal, this should be Destination.
   You should redirect new subscribers to a Thank You page. That’s the Destination goal you want.
3. If you’re tracking sales, you can assign a value to it.
4. The Funnel allows you to set up the path you want people to take to reach the destination page.
   If you want to create a goal that tracks if people take a certain path through your site, so for example they start on the Home page, go to the About page, then your Work With Me page, then your Contact page and then they end up on the Thank You page, you can use the Funnel to track that. You can make it required if you only want to track people that go through the exact steps of the funnel.
   Since you likely have several pages where people can subscribe, you can leave it turned off.

Analyzing the data in Google Analytics: Where do your subscribers come from?

Now that your goals are set up, you can see the results under Conversions > Goals > Overview. The first view is the Goal Completion Location, which is the page you want visitors to end up on. You can also set up goals that have multiple Goal Completion Locations, and then you can see which locations the goal was completed on.

Source/medium shows you where your new subscribers came from. These are sources like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, other social media channels or sites you’re featured on. When you know which source converts best for you, you can work on getting more visitors from those sources. For example, if you get most subscribers from Pinterest, you can decide to double-down on your Pinterest marketing to get more visitors. 

Another report you want to look at is Reverse Goal Path. This shows you which pages and posts get you the most subscribers. If a specific blog post is generating a lot more subscribers than other posts, figure out what it is about that post that works so well. You can then use that to improve your other posts. You can also try to get even more traffic to that specific blog post, by promoting it more on social media.

How to exclude inaccurate referral traffic

Now when I first set this up, in my Analytics I had quite a bit of referral traffic for my opt-in freebie. But it was all referral traffic from ConvertKit, my mailing list provider. This wasn’t actually traffic from ConvertKit – when people signed up, they were being redirected to ConvertKit to add them to my list, then redirected back to my site.
You can exclude referrals like this from your analytics, so you can see where these subscribers came from before they came back from ConvertKit.

1. Go to the admin area and under Tracking Info go to the Referral Exclusion List.
2. Add the domain that’s being registered as referral traffic, like app.convertkit.com.

These URLs won’t be counted as referral traffic anymore but instead, get the original source that the traffic came from.