Setting up goals and conversions in your analytics

Website analytics will happily tell you how many people visited, which pages they viewed and how long they stayed. None of that tells you whether your site is doing its job. For a membership site, the job is turning visitors into subscribers, trial users and paying members. Until your analytics knows when those things happen, it cannot tell you which pages, campaigns or sources are producing them.

That is what conversions are for. A conversion, sometimes called a goal, is an action you want visitors to take, recorded by your analytics at the moment it happens. Setting them up properly takes an afternoon and turns a pile of traffic numbers into answers you can act on.

Choose a small set of conversions

Resist the urge to track everything. Pick one main conversion and a handful of supporting steps that lead to it, following the path from first contact to joining:

• Main conversion: a completed paid sign-up.
• Trial started, if you offer a free trial.
• Email sign-up from a lead magnet or newsletter form.
• Checkout started, so you can see how many people begin paying but stop.
• Pricing page viewed, as a signal of serious interest.

Five is plenty. A dozen conversions of equal importance means none of them gets looked at properly. Mark only the paid sign-up as your primary conversion, so reports that total conversions are not inflated by newsletter subscribers.

Decide how each conversion is recorded

Analytics tools usually record a conversion in one of two ways.

Reaching a confirmation page

The conversion counts when someone lands on a page they can only reach by completing the action, such as a thank-you page after sign-up. This is the most reliable method for membership sites, because it records a success rather than an attempt. Give each conversion its own confirmation page, keep those pages out of your menus and out of search results, and count the conversion once per visit so a reload does not double it.

Recording an event

The conversion counts when a specific action happens, such as a form being submitted or a video being played. Events are useful for steps with no page of their own. Be careful with button clicks: counting clicks on a Join button records intent, not success. If the payment then fails, you have a conversion that never happened.

Test before you trust the numbers

Every conversion you set up needs a test run:

1. Complete the action yourself, using a test payment or a real low-cost plan you then refund.
2. Check that the conversion appears in your analytics, attributed to the right page and source.
3. Repeat on a phone, since mobile checkouts sometimes take a different route.
4. Exclude your own visits and test purchases, by filtering your internal traffic or marking test accounts clearly, so they do not pollute real results.
5. Write down what each conversion means and how it is recorded, so it still makes sense when you look back in six months.

Give conversions a value

Not every conversion is worth the same. Giving each one a rough value helps you compare a page that produces many email sign-ups with a page that produces a few paid members.

Take a hypothetical ceramics membership run by a potter named Anneke. The figures are invented to show the method. In a typical month, her site gets 6,000 visits, 240 email sign-ups, 60 trial starts and 30 paid sign-ups. She estimates that a paying member is worth about $300 in margin over their membership.

• Half of her trials become paying members, so a trial start is worth about $300 ÷ 2 = $150.
• About one in eight email subscribers eventually joins, so an email sign-up is worth about $300 ÷ 8 = $37.50.

Now a glazing guide that brings in 40 email sign-ups a month is worth roughly 40 × $37.50 = $1,500 in future member value, while a flashier page that produces two trial starts is worth about $300. Without values, the second page might look more important because trial starts sound closer to money. For more on the trial step itself, see measuring trial conversion.

Expect analytics to undercount

Your analytics will almost never match your membership software exactly. Some visitors block tracking, some decline cookies and some switch devices between visiting and paying. Anneke's analytics might show 26 paid sign-ups in a month when her membership records show 30.

That is normal, and it is why you need both. Use your membership software for the true totals: how many members joined and what they pay. Use analytics for comparisons: which pages, sources and campaigns produce more conversions relative to each other. As long as the gap stays fairly steady, the comparisons hold. If it suddenly widens, check whether a confirmation page has changed or a tracking snippet has gone missing.

Consent rules for analytics and cookies vary by country, so check what applies to your site with a qualified professional, and set up conversion tracking in a way that respects visitors' choices.

Setting up your conversions

1. List your main conversion and up to four supporting steps.
2. Make sure each has a confirmation page or a clearly defined event.
3. Set them up in your analytics tool and mark the paid sign-up as primary.
4. Run a test of each on a computer and a phone, then exclude your own traffic.
5. Assign rough values based on how often each step leads to a paying member.
6. Compare a month of analytics conversions with your membership records and note the usual gap.
7. Review conversions by page and source each month, and improve the pages that bring in the most value.