How to view Conversion Rates for Specific Goals in Google Analytics

The conversion report in Google Analytics is probably the most important report in the entire platform. The conversion report shows you the percentage and absolute numbers of visits which converted into a set of defined goals for the website. Goals could be anything from enquiries through to video views.

Example of the conversion overview report:

google-analytics-goals

This particular website converted 3.65% of traffic (conversion rate) into performing some sort of action which I have determined as a goal for the website. A total of 147 goals (absolute number) were completed in this particular month and this is one of many metrics used to measure the performance of the website month on month or quarter by quarter.

What about the conversion rate for just the enquiries?

The issue I have with the above conversion report is that it’s difficult to view the conversion rates for each of the goals, especially the lead generating goals. Whilst it’s good to focus on absolute numbers, it’s also interesting to see the conversion rates for each specific goal. You can then refine marketing initiatives to improve each goal or a set of goals for example.

Enter the wonderful facility of custom reports.

Set up a custom report with the following metrics depending on the goals you want to view the conversion rates for:

create-custom-report

Note: Select ‘Page’ as a dimension as you can’t save a custom report without selecting a dimension. You can ignore this data in the report if you wish.

Once you have created your custom report you can hit save and you will then be presented with something like this:

goal-conversion-report

Voila! Now you can see the conversion rate by goal. To get a conversion rate for your lead generating goals all you do is add the conversion rates together. So in this case it’s 2.11% (goal 1 + goal 2 + goal 3 + goal 4 + goal 5 + goal 7).

The website converts 2.11% of traffic into sales leads.

When reporting, it might be useful to report both conversion rates and absolute numbers purely because traffic generating tactics will skew numbers for any particular month. A classic example of this is when social media activity is increased. Great as a traffic driver, probably not so for conversions thus resulting in lower conversion rates for that month.

If anyone knows of a quicker way to get conversion rates for each goal then please do let me know via the comments area.

5 thoughts on “How to view Conversion Rates for Specific Goals in Google Analytics

  1. Ravi Sodha

    Nice post!

    It can be fun to apply segments to this report i.e. “new” & “returning” visitors (or “member”/”non-member” if applicable) and compare the differences in behaviour.

    Obviously, you can use a more useful dimension like medium to see the different conversion rates for each medium or even keyword.

    Reply
    1. Pritesh Patel Post author

      Thanks Ravi. I think at a basic level this might be satisfactory.

      I’ve just changed the dimension to ‘source’ and its useful (to those who know what they’re looking at) if you want to view the absolute number of goals from each source. I don’t think it’s wise to view conversion rates by source in isolation though. Example is source1 generates 52 goals with conversion rate of 5.08% and source 2 generates 1 goal with a conversion rate of 7.14%.

      Might play around with the dimensions actually.

      Reply
  2. Ravi Sodha

    Thats a good point. Always give conversion rates context with absolute numbers. I guess the custom report can include absolute numbers too.

    Also, found another way of viewing goal conversion rate. Go to the traffic sources report and click on “Goal Set 1” above the graph

    Reply
  3. hc

    Hi Prit, nice post!

    I am searching all over the net on how to set up report for each specific goals and stumble upon this post.

    I have difficulties in setting up this report as I am quite new to GA.

    Can you guie me step by step?

    Thank you.

    HC

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Ravi Sodha Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *