Knowing how well your website is converting is critical for businesses selling goods and services online. For example, at Zendesk, we’ve found that visitors who have a chat are three times more likely to sign up for a trial.
Zendesk Chat already offers an analytics feature that gives you an efficient way of tracking your chat and agent activity. With Chat Analytics, you can track your chat volume to get a better idea of which days are the busiest, examine why chats are being missed, why wait times are increasing during certain periods, and you can use these metrics to anticipate customer needs and increase satisfaction.
You can track which pages your visitors are chatting from and whether they are converting to paying customers using Zendesk Chat's integration with Google Analytics.
Note: This tutorial assumes that you are already using Google Analytics and are familiar with the basics of how it works. If you’re new, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that helps you understand and analyze your web traffic. You can easily find good tutorials online explaining how GA works.
Here’s how to get started tracking website conversions:
- Set up Zendesk Chat and Google Analytics
- Creating goals on Google Analytics
- Monitoring your chat conversion rate
Set up Zendesk Chat and Google Analytics
Before you can track your chat conversions on Google Analytics, you’ll need to set up Zendesk Chat and Google Analytics. We’ve provided a complete guide on how to do that here: Using Google Analytics with Zendesk Chat.
In this guide, we’ll focus on using the Zendesk Chat/Google Analytics integration to track conversions from chat.
Creating goals on Google Analytics
Assuming you’re already tracking chat statistics, the first thing you’ll need to do on Google Analytics is create a goal.
The goal you create depends on the metric you want to track. For example, if you sell shoes on your website, your goal might be to track how many of each pair of shoes you sell.
To create this goal:
- Sign in to Google Analytics.
- Select the Admin tab and navigate to the desired account, property and view.
- In the VIEW column, click Goals.
- Click + NEW GOAL or Import from Gallery to create a new goal, or click an existing goal to edit its configuration.
- Select the Place an order template.
- Next, enter a description for your goal and select a goal type, which determines the action you're measuring. In this example, we want to track when shoes get sold, so the Destination type should work.
Note: Learn more about other goal types and what they track in Google’s support forum. - Finally, enter the goal's destination. In this case, you would select something like /thank-you.html, or whatever the URL is of the page that appears after someone has made a purchase.
And that’s it! Now you can track how many of your website visitors are meeting the goal from anywhere in Google Analytics. For example, you might find that 100 people visit your website and 10 of them make it to the /thank-you.html page. This indicates that your website has a 10% conversion rate, or 10 people have made a purchase.
Monitoring your chat conversion rate
Once you're set up to track your overall goals in Google Analytics, you can then refine to segment out only the chat traffic. To do this, we'll create a segment using the Served by Operator event, which measures each time a visitor chats with an agent.
- Go to any view in Google Analytics and click on +Add Segment.
- Next, click +NEW SEGMENT.
- Select Conditions and filter by Event Action.
- Set the event action to Served by Operator.
- Name your segment and click Save.
That’s it! Your segment is now ready and you can use it to compare the conversion rate of your website before and after chat.
You should now have two sections below, one showing you the percentage of visitors that completed your goal and another showing the percentage of visitors who had a chat (Served by Operator) and then reached the goal.
Once you’ve got everything set up and the stats start rolling in, come back and tell us what you've learned about your chat conversion rate in a comment below!