Objective

Use the Google Analytics (GA) Goals feature to track email signups that occur through Topspin widgets.

Prerequisites

• You must have Google Analytics (GA) setup and installed. See this article for details: Site Analytics Through Google Analytics.
• You must be using a hosted/customized version of Topspin's email.php download page for email for media widgets. See this article for details: Customizing Email For Media Landing Pages

Best Practice Walkthrough

To access the page to setup a Goal conversion, visit the main page of your Google analytics account. You will see an edit button under the column actions in the same line as your website name. If you do not see this, it means you do not have admin rights to the account. You will not be able to proceed until you are granted such rights by the account holder.

Click the edit button and notice the tab for goal conversions and funnels. You can set up a variety of conversion paths, but for the purposes of this discussion, we will setup a goal for an email signup that uses a Topspin widget.

Goal Setup:

1. To the right of G1, click Edit under settings.
2. Set Active Goal to On, with Match Type as “Head Match.”
3. For the goal url, insert the directory and page of the url that the user has to go to in order to retrieve their email download. This is the url that points to your hosted/customized version of email.php (ie. if it’shttp://ilovemetric.com/email/email.php, insert “/email/email.php”).
4. Set the goal name to Email Confirmation, ensure case-sensitive is NOT checked. You can leave the goal value zero unless you'd like to attach a monetary value to an email signup - this may be helpful when examining the value of traffic that other sites are referring to you. In such a case, an easy to scale number like $1 is helpful.
5. Under Step 1, set this as “/” (represents the homepage of the site). Under description, type in homepage. Ensure required step is NOT checked.
6. If your email for download widget is on the homepage, skip this step. Else, under Step 2, insert the directory and url of the page that hosts the email for download widget (ie. if it’s http://ilovemetric.com/emailwidget.html, insert “/emailwidget.html”).
7. Save changes, and the email confirmation goal is all set up!

Reporting:

To view goal conversions:

1. Log into your GA account and navigate to your profile dashboard.
2. Select the "Traffic Sources" link in the left navigation pane.
3. Select the "All Traffic Sources" option in the sub-navigation.

Beneath the graph in the displayed report, you'll notice a set of tabs that should include "Site Usage" and "Goal 1" If you do not see a Goal 1 tab, ensure you've properly setup your goal as described above.

Click the Goal 1 tab. You will see what percentage of traffic converted (signed up via the widget).

The Goal 1 tab will also show up in various reports like:

• Traffic by country: you can see what countries/states/cities are converting.
• The "Goals" section in the main navigation. This gives you several other ways to view goal performance. To dive head first into the world of GA Goals, their website is the best reference:http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=11086

Related Links And Documents

You can also track sales by marketing activity: 
Tracking Sales Conversion By Marketing Activity With Topspin And Google Analytics

You can also track sales by referring website: 
Tracking Sales Conversion By Referrer With Topspin And Google Analytics