Selling Online Explained: The Sales Funnel

When it comes to getting online and being a success one thing that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls are making sales. It’s just that simple. Having good traffic is important but if you cannot convert people to buy from you then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you have. Running an online business is a lot like running a physical business. There are differences of course but in the end success in business is attributed to sales and the ability to sell.

The great thing about selling online is that in some cases it’s easier to track your success using web analytics tools like Google Analytics. As anyone might be able to tell, I love using Google Analytics myself and I recommend it to anyone looking to start tracking their site. I even use it on SpicyWebDesigners.com to track visits, internal site searches and the health of the site. There is a concept that I am going to let you in on that allows you to track customers and add some intelligence to your decision making around the sales process on your site.

A “Sales Funnel” is defined as…

…is the way that both direct sales persons and SFA (Sales force automation) systems visualize the sales process of a company.

Source: Wikipedia

This is the traditional definition of a sales funnel that I am sure most sales pros are familiar with and large companies use funnels like this for their online and offline business channels because it allows them to track and check everything from the return on investment to the success or failure of a campaign that they are currently running. When talking about web and ecommerce sites the term changes to “Conversion Funnel” which is a way to visualize the tracking of conversions (a.k.a. “Sales”) made on the web. With respect to selling online you’ll find that some people call it a “Sales Funnel” or a “Conversion Funnel” and both terms are used interchangeably. In Google Analytics, the sales funnel visualization looks like this (See Below)

So now we’ve walked through what a sales funnel. Next, I’ll show you how easy it is to add a sales funnel to your web or ecommerce site the first thing you will need to do is to get a Google Analytics account. Click here to get one and once you’ve done that keep reading. Now that you’ve got your Google Analytics account you can add the Google Analytics Tracking Code (GATC) to your website just before the end </body> tag.

1. Login to Google Analytics
2. Click “Edit” next to the “website profile” you want to add a goal to specifically
3. In the “Goals” section on this page, click “Add Goal”
4. Next, name your goal (something like “Made Contact” if you are tracking the contact page of your website), make sure the “Goal Active” = On, set your Goal position, and select “Goal Type” = Destination URL
5. Selecting the “Goal Type” = Destination URL opens a set of Goal Detail fields that you will need to set specific to your own needs including “Match Type”, “Goal URL” (this is the final URL you want your customers to end up on and is also known as the destination URL, “Case Sensitive” and “Goal Value”
6. Next, you’ll notice a “Goal Funnel” section
7. Click the “+ Yes, create a funnel for this goal” link and add the mandatory steps in your goal
8. Click “Save Goal” and you can begin collecting stats about your conversion or sales funnel

Now if you want to see your funnel in action simply click “View Reports” on the website profile you’ve set the goal and funnel on, click on “Goals” in the upper left hand side of the page and click “Funnel Visualization”. This is definitely a very useful tool (if implemented correctly) that can shed light on potential problems and possible opportunities that can lead to finding ways to improve your business and find new ways to increase profitability.

Luc Arnold

Finding profit in the strangest places… On your website!