How many leads does your website get? Here’s the simplest way to track conversions

Your website is the front door of your entire credit union. Look at your analytics and you’ll see that it gets far more visits than any of your branches, which makes it one of the most powerful tools you have to grow loans and deposits. But I’ve talked with hundreds of CU marketers about credit union website design and have learned something crazy:

Some marketers have no idea how many leads they get from their websites.

Analytics are too complicated

Every credit union marketer knows the importance of analytics. So, why don’t they track goals, like these?

• Loan applications started
• Membership applications received
• Credit union memes viewed (just kidding, but here’s one of my favorites)

Here’s the problem I’ve discovered from my conversations with CU marketers: analytics are too complicated and credit union marketers simply don’t know how to set up goal tracking on their websites.

A website without goal tracking is like a soccer game without a score. Scores helps athletes measure their performance and improve.

In this article, I’m going to share a solution that makes goal tracking extremely easy. But before we go on, let me distinguish “goal tracking” from other website metrics.

Goal tracking is the hard part

You can install Google Analytics (GA) on your website in a matter of minutes and it will automatically give you more data than you’ve ever wanted (e.g., number of users and sessions, bounce rate, session duration, etc., etc., etc.).

But GA doesn’t automatically set up goals. Goals are the most important things you can track (like “number of applications started”), but you have to set them up manually because they require human intelligence (at least until The Singularity when robots take over the world, ha).

The trouble is that setting up goals often requires specialized knowledge about the anatomy of analytics “events” and Google Tag Manager—things most CU marketers aren’t familiar with.

The anatomy of event tracking in Google Analytics

The simplest way to set up goals

My company, BloomCU, specializes in credit union web design and we wanted to find a way for our clients to easily set up goals for their websites.

We spent hours talking with our clients and investigating solutions—we even collaborated with three other agencies to learn how they set up goals—but all paths led to the same answer: “You need to pair Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager to create a data layer and then perform a few feats of technical gymnastics to view the results you’re interested in.”

That’s not the mega-simple solution we were hoping for. There had to be an easier way.

Finally, we asked ourselves, “What’s the ideal solution?” and my coworker said, “It would be awesome if our clients could just look at their websites and click on the stuff they want to track.” And that’s how GoalMode was born:

To set up a goal with GoalMode, all you have to do is point, click, and save. (The technical gymnastics are handled by the software behind the scenes.) Then, your goal metrics are automatically displayed in a simple dashboard.

Goal tracking gives you insights into your credit union website design: the products, content, and functionality your audience prefers; what’s working and what’s not; and where to spend money or hold back. And those insights translate into more loans, deposits, and growth for your credit union (oh, and a raise for you).

GoalMode makes conversion tracking a snap, but you can set up goals without it by following these guides from Google: “Create, edit, and share goals” and “Google Analytics events”.