This can give you a crystal-clear view of what pages in the checkout process of your online store are literally losing you sales hand over fist. This post is an adjunct to an earlier post on this blog which is at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/.

Once you can then see which culprit pages are scaring your customers away (just as they have taken out their credit card), you are thus armed with the knowledge of which pages need changing in order to boost your conversion rate and therefore your sales.

Ok so when you log in to your Google Analytics account, click on the website profile name that you want to add the goal and funnel tracking to, and on the next page click the the “Edit” link on the right hand side of the website profile. Next appears the website profile for your Zen Cart site. Click on the “Edit” link for the first available “Conversion Goals and Funnel” profile.

Next, enter in the data into the required fields as shown in the screenshot below.

So firstly, you have an Active Goal, then use the Head Match option with the Goal URL (the checkout_success page), name the Goal something like “Checkout Complete” and then fill in the details for the checkout Funnel, which starts with the “login” page, then the checkout_shipping page, then the checkout_payment page and then the checkout_confirmation page. The Goal URL should be the exact same value as the one entered at the top of the page.

If your site is not built on Zen Cart, just replace the URL’s in the sample above with those from your site, starting with the URL of the first page which begins the checkout process, and the Goal URL being the page URL which is displayed to the user when they have completed payment (the “thank you” page). Make sure to leave out the dynamic query parameters part of the URL (i.e. everything after the “?” in the URL).

So that’s it, click “Save Changes” and you’re all set! Now you will be able to view all of the Google Analytics Goals reports for this website profile. It will take a day or so before any data is available of course, and may take a week or two before you have enough data to make accurate judgements about what needs changing.

Make special use of the “Funnel Visualisation” report which is shown in my previous post at http://webreach.ie/blog/checkout-goal-and-funnel-analytics-where-are-we-losing-sales-on-our-online-store/. This is a very powerful chart showing visitor behaviour in your checkout funnel, visitor entry and exit points etc. and will show you what pages along the way in the checkout process that people are abandoning their purchase, giving you vital information about changes you need to make to your site pages.

Your questions, comments and feedback are welcome, and please do bookmark these posts and share the link love!