How To Track Sales From Your Blog Posts in Google Analytics

Wondering how well your blog is performing?

Well, there’s a way for you to track said blog performance. Tracking your content, such as blog posts and other articles, is actually quite a key figure when it comes to the success of blogging. Without tracking, you don’t have any data to compare – you can’t compare which posts performed better in order to repeat that kind of success.

Blogs help your site. Whether it’s driving more traffic, driving a sale, or just getting your name out there. But blogging without a goal and without tracking the data can make your work seem fruitless. How are you to know which published blog generated the most traffic, the most sales? Do you know if your blogs actually generated anything?

These kinds of questions can be answered very easily by tracking their data in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

First of all, Google Analytics. You need it installed on your site. Don’t have it? No worries – follow along.

To begin with, you have to register for GA, which you can do here. And once you’ve done that you need to verify your website as a property in Google’s search console. The tracking code you receive has to go into your site HTML. To find the tracking code in analytics, you need to go into your Admin tab and then into Property where you’ll find the tracking code.

Remember: this tracking code goes on every single page. Every page you want tracked? The code needs to go into the HTML. If you’re not really sure about the placement of the Google Analytics code on your site, don’t fret! There is a guide available that you can look through for guidance.

What’s Your Goal?

Google Analytics gives you the option to set and further define your goals. So those pages you wanted tracked are now recording every beneficial action a user is doing on your site. Google’s four goal categories are as follows:

• Destinations: When a user performs an action that sends them directly to a 1:1 page, a page that only loads for one specific action. Like signing up for the monthly newsletter, for instance.
• Events: When users click on things on your page, it’s an event. Think clicking an ad or pressing the social button which allows them to share the page online.
• Pages per Session: You can set out specific goals that track a user’s session. Say there is a user who visits only one page on your site, you may not want to class them as a proper user of your site. Instead, you might choose to set a set number of pages per session until the person is considered a user of your website.
• Length of Time: Some site owners set up particular goals that focus more on the duration of time a user has spent on their site. Often times, a longer time spent on your site is a good sign and can sometimes lead to a social share or a sale.

Your job is to figure out what you want your goals to be.

Use GA Reports

Reports are a way for you to actually see your data in a presentable way and you should have no trouble accessing this after setting up your data tracker.

“Pageviews per conversion” gives you your own conversion rate and “conversion rate per page” allows you to see exactly which pieces of your content are getting you the most conversions. The best thing about the difference between the two is that you can compare them against one another.

Is the correlation between page views per page and conversions per page because of one thing or another? Due to popularity or purchases, for instance. You can also determine if the conversions and the page views are coming from the same audience or if it’s two separate audiences.

Google Analytics has a number of reports available:

• Audience
• Active Users
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Lifetime Value per Channel
• Conversions Rate per Channel

So there’s numerous ways to see your data compiled and to look for issues that you can then try to eliminate.

Have You Optimised For Sales?

When you have Google Analytics on hand, tracking sales from your blog posts is one of the more easier things you can do. If you’ve thoroughly outlined your goals, paired with a significant amount of data set up, you can get plenty of information.

Then you have to consider how you’ll put that information to use. Looking through the reports, you can gage things like underperformance and high performance. And the best thing here is the side-by-side comparisons you can start to make.

Which blog posts were your high performers and which ones have a relatively poor performance? You can begin to look at the piece of content itself and analyse it – did it have plenty of images? Was it about a company value or a product in particular, was it advertised in any way, did you try a new style. These kinds of things. Because once you determine the reasons behind the performance, you can start to emanate more of the high performing ones.

With Google Analytics, you can also look for any problems that might be occurring in the conversion process. Examine a user’s journey from the beginning – from when they first land on your site right up until they leave your site. Did they make any additional stops on other pages, maybe products or services? How far through did they get on your products or services pages; did they click off the page after reading the product specifications, the description, or the price?

It’s also helpful to use this information to look for potential bugs on your website as it could also be a bug or an error which is stopping user’s going any further on your site.

Get in Touch with SEO Agency GrowTraffic

When we say that it’s easy to set up your business on Google Analytics, we’re not lying. It really is!

Hopefully this post has given you at least one reason as to why you should be using Google Analytics as well as how you can track sales through it.

If you’re interested in any of the digital marketing services we have to offer, just reach out. We can help you with your content marketing strategies, coming up with tactics and strategies that will be best suited to your business.

GrowTraffic has been delivering SEO strategies and digital marketing service to clients for more than a decade, now. So when it comes to SEO, we’ve seen a lot – good and bad. And we’d like to say that we know what we’re doing. And that we’ve done a pretty good job of it, too.

Inbox us at info@growtraffic.co.uk or call us on 01706 706 0012 to speak directly with one of our team!