setting conversion goals for selling ebooks

Setting Conversion Goals for Selling eBooks

How can you know if your online eBooks store is growing over time, or remaining stagnant? In this day and age, entrepreneurs have access to analytics programs.

These are great resources for setting benchmarks, tracking return on investment and monitoring overall growth. However, with so many metrics and dimensions available, it’s easy to get caught up in minutia—in other words, a narrow focus means it’s easy to fall into the trap of missing the forest for the trees.

By setting conversion goals for selling eBooks, your website will be able to track what’s truly important for overall success on programs like Google Analytics. It all boils down to being able to set and track the right objectives so you can quickly pull any information you need from your dashboard and reports. Goals measure “how often users complete specific actions.”

As Kissmetrics outlines, there are four broad methods for assessing goals:

  • URL destination goals: Triggered each time someone visits a URL, these are best for tracking submission pages (like purchase and download confirmations).
  • Time on site: Measuring how many visitors stay on certain pages for how long (which is ideal for tracking the effectiveness of informational pages).
  • Pages/visit: Tracks how many pages visitors view before leaving, making it useful for judging engagement with your content.
  • Events: Specific to each site, established goal events can help you gauge everything in between (from average time watching a video to PDF downloads).

Let’s say you decide to join the growing movement of companies pivoting to video. You spend money and time creating an informative how-to clip walking users through the process of buying and downloading eBooks to their various devices. Setting up an event goal tracking the amount of time viewers spend watching said video is the only way to know if it’s been a worthwhile endeavor.

If you find people are spending several minutes watching the video to the end, you may want to make more in the future. If the average watch duration is 10 seconds, it’s time to tweak your approach or reconsider the video’s placement on your website.

But wait, isn’t selling ebooks the ultimate goal? Absolutely. These metrics allow entrepreneurs to gauge the effectiveness of their website design, content creation, marketing efforts and navigation—all crucial parts of the overall sales funnel. Without insight into metrics beyond revenue, every effort would be a shot in the dark.

Monitoring both “soft goals” and “hard goals” is the best way to make sure everything is running smoothly and eBook sales are proceeding according to plan.

Hard goals include things like actual conversions and the resulting ecommerce conversion rate. A significant drop-off indicates a potential problem with some part of your website. Conversely, a significant uptick in sales indicates some part of your marketing or sales plan is going well—a method you may aim to replicate moving forward.

Long story short: the goals you set for your eBook store influence the actual events and benchmarks you track using an analytics program. There’s simply not enough time in the day to track every metric under the sun, so choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) is the only way to measure the health of your online eBook business as you go.

The best way to collect information about these KPIs is to configure your goals in analytics and tracking them over time.

Setting conversion goals for selling eBooks allows you to designate what’s important and focus on those markers; conversions, conversion rate, downloads, time spent on site, paths consumers take to buy books and many more.

Use your business objective to establish goals and then take the time to measure them in analytics. You’ll thank yourself when the data starts to roll in and positively inform your management decisions.