Steps to Setup Sales Funnel in Google Analytics

For a person to buy your product, they must:

• Learn about him
• Get interested
• To want to possess it

This entire path to the actual purchase is perfectly illustrated by a tool as a “sales funnel” on Google Analytic. And with its help, you can assess the effectiveness of a particular channel of interaction with the audience, adjust their work and increase the conversions to purchase. We will tell you what stages are included in the funnel, where to get data for it, visualize and analyze it, and what it gives to the business.

Sales funnel stages

Building a sales funnel begins by examining the AIDA (attention-interest-need-action) model, and the work in accordance with it turns the audience into buyers and regular customers.

1. Attention

Attention is drawn through a promotional offer. Take into account all available sources: from banner ads on the Internet to billboards on the way to the airport, from posting with bloggers to distributing flyers near the metro. It is important to understand where and how your audience members interact with ads and focus on these points of familiarity with you and your products.

2. Interest 

When you have attracted attention, it is essential to interest a potential buyer and provokes him to action: a call to the store, a message to the messenger, following a link to a selling landing page, a trip to the store. 

During the lead stage, how you put together your unique selling proposition is essential. When you’ve worked it out, consider whether it evokes emotion and a need for your product or service. If not, redo the USP. 

3. Need 

A person should move to a need for your product from simple interest. To do this, he must correlate his requests, and on your part, a potential buyer should be encouraged to decide by motivating texts on the landing page, the friendly staff at the checkout or competent social media accounts, delivery conditions, or even a discount.

4. Action 

A person must move to action from the need for a product, that is, a purchase. At the final stage of the sales funnel, everything must go smoothly:

• The client places an order on the website.
• It responds on time for confirmation.
• The delivery goes smoothly.
• The goods are in good condition.

Or the seller on the trading floor thoroughly answered all the client’s questions and helped him with the purchase. 

How to set up a sales funnel?

To visually track all the metrics of the funnel, its data need visualisation and this can be done using the following tools: 

1. Power BI: This service helps to build a detailed funnel based on an impressive array of data. Suitable for seasoned marketers because the system is difficult to understand and study; 
2. Excel/Google Sheets: These essential services provide the ability to drill down into funnels of any level. For example, you can track the performance of targeted or contextual advertising with detailed down to cost per click and their total number;
3. CRM system: If you need meticulous information detailing, then a CRM system is what you need. It can automatically build funnels based on automatically received data. It is enough to connect your advertising system and metrics to it. 

Setting up a sales funnel and visual data in it will allow you to understand which channel works better and which one is lagging and need improvement. So, budget spending will be based on statistics, not on feelings. 

How to collect information for visualization? 

Where did the buyer come from, which section of the site he studied the longest, which products he placed in the cart, and which ones he bought – all this information is needed to form a detailed sales funnel. Data can be collected from Yandex analytics. Direct, Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, metrics services on Google analytic, ask sales managers, and so on.

In order not to collect data manually, it is worth setting up automatic uploading of information. In this case, for example, Google. The metrics will collect metrics from your CRM system. And the human error factor will be less to almost zero. 

Conversion and key metrics

The creation and development of a sales funnel make sense only with the subsequent analysis of indicators. There may be several important but unique variables for a given business. For example, the number of products  in the cart is into account for an online store, and for a food delivery service, the number of people who have used a promotional code for a discount. But for everyone, there are three main indicators: total conversion, conversion between stages, funnel length. 

• Overall conversion: this is the main KPI in marketing: the number of people who converted from seeing ads to real buyers. It is impossible to name any average ideal indicators of total conversion, but the task at the same time is quite obvious- to increase the current one.

To understand whether your conversion is good or not, you should focus on ROI. These metrics tell you how much your marketing investment is paying off, and it must always exceed 100%. ROI can calculate using the formula. 

• Conversions between stages: This indicator speaks about the percentage of people who have moved from one stage to another. You can calculate conversion by services such as Google Metrics and Google Analytics in automatic mode. Connect them to the site, specify the goals for collecting and calculating data, analyze the results!
• Funnel length: Everything is evident here: look at the number of stages, analyze them, and modify them if necessary. Let’s say your funnel may lack the stage of preparing a person for a purchase, or there is an extra step. 

How to increase conversion

Sales funnel metrics- What you can and should use to grow your business. From them, you will understand what is sagging in your marketing, what improvement is needed, and how to attract many customers at affordable prices. 

To optimize and increase your sales conversions, SEO companies use below mentioned tips:

1. Study the needs of the target audience. You need to thoroughly know the portraits of your audience, not only age and gender but also consumer ability, interests, motives, and barriers before buying. The more data you have about potential buyers, the cheaper and more accurate advertising in target and context. To get the missing data, do not hesitate to conduct surveys, study reviews of your products and competitors’ products;
2. Improve your Unique Selling Proposition. Remember or write down: USP can always be made better. If one proposal ideally suits to the audience’s needs a year ago, then today, it needs to revise and modernize. Make sure that the USP is attractive to the representatives of your target audience;
3. Deal with objections. Customers will always have objections, no matter how cool your USP is. Some of them can be workout even when warming up interest, and others can “close” immediately before purchasing. Prioritize objections and figure out how to work them out;
4. Do funnel analysis. Come up with hypotheses, test them, keep best practices. Monitor indicators and mechanics, adjust as needed.

How does this all affect business?

The conversion within the funnel demonstrates the real situation in the business at the current stage, its strengths, and weaknesses. Helps to improve performance. All business processes should constantly analyze and optimize: get rid of unnecessary stages or add them to increase conversion. Understanding the principles and features of the sales funnel, you can do this quickly and efficiently.