Setting Up Conversion Funnels for Dating Site

Google Analytics Dating Site

[WytzeNL]

Hi,

We recently took on a new client that has a dating site. My client informed me yesterday that he wants more female audience and couples to his website.

We already have successful PPC campaigns going to the website which is resulting in both male, female and couple signups. I can only see this at the back end, but there is no way for me to see which / what keywords generated the most female signups.

How would you set this up inside Google Analytics ? A little help / push in the right direction would be greatly appreciated :)

Thanks !

[BradleyT]

Offhand the only way I think this is going to work is if they send each group (male/female/couple) to a unique URL thank you page because while your backend can look in the database to see male/female/couple, obviously GA cannot see this information.

If that's in place then you could create 3 advanced segments (1 for each type) using 1 Dimension. Dimension would be Content -> Page (Matches Exactly) female.html (or whatever thank you page is for the ladies). Then when you look at keyword reports and click the checkbox for your new advanced segment it will show users who qualified for that segment.

It might not be the best way to do things but you're pretty limited with this kind of stuff when using GA. If they had say a cookie set with male/female/couple then some mid-range analytics packages could give you 10x more usable data than GA.

[edited by: BradleyT at 5:48 pm (utc) on Mar. 19, 2009]

[WytzeNL]

Thanks for the input Bradley, so you would start with two totally different goal funnels ?

What mid range analytics package would you recommend ? my client is on a tight budget..

[BradleyT]

Thanks for the input Bradley, so you would start with two totally different goal funnels ?

It doesn't necessarily have to be two goal funnels you just need a way for GA to see that someone is male or female. But probably the easiest way is to use distinct URLs on the thank you page for each gender - which is really two different goal funnels like you stated.

What mid range analytics package would you recommend ? my client is on a tight budget..

The one I'm most familar with is ClickTracks Pro Server. However it seems like their company got bought out by Lyris and now part of a big package which I'm not familar with. GA has done a lot of catching up with the release of advanced segments a few months back but they're still behind analytics products that can read cookies and let you segment based on those.

But if you can do the URL thing then you can just use that to segment male and female and should be able to get plenty of insight from that.

[epistable]

Have you considered using the visitor segmentation feature in GA? You could use that to set a cookie with either male or female or any other piece of not-frequently changing data. They have more info about this at:
[code.google.com...]

[BradleyT]

Yeah that would be a much better way. I'm not sure if the advanced segments set based on a page capture visitor data when they return to the site if they don't visit that page.

For example:
March 1st - visitor goes to thanks.php?g=f and gets set as a female visitor based on that page.
March 15th - visitor returns to site, do they still qualify for the female segment? (I'm not sure!) If they don't then my method won't work too well.

[edited by: BradleyT at 6:28 pm (utc) on Mar. 20, 2009]